Are the horror stories of using wayland with nvidia proprietary drivers now history?

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There used to be many threads and “tech expert sites” cautioning again using wayland with the nvidia proprietary drivers. I am wondering if that is lore or history now or whether this is still to be avoided.

If it is history, I am assuming that it would be true also for leap 16…

Is use of wayland with nvidia proprietary drivers to be used with caution or avoided anymore?

Experiences! good or bad?

Running a test and potentially losing my graphics puts me in a position where I can’t get in contact with the forum to get help. So I am asking others.

thanks, tom kosvic

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@tckosvic Don’t know about Leap 15.6, but all fine on Leap 16.0 with a Quadro T400 and closed driver via the rpms running GNOME/Wayland (the iGPU is Intel 630 as a Display Controller).

Likewise Nvidia Containers on Leap 16.0 with a Quadro P400 and a Tesla P4 and closed rpms.

The reason I use the closed driver is it rebuilds on a kernel update.

On Tumbleweed I use the run (no secure boot) file and open driver with a just Quadro RTX4000 with GNOME/Wayland powering three screens.

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My Leap installation are only VMs. But the physical machines run Tumbleweed + proprietary Nvidia drivers + Wayland flawlessly since a long time.

As Leap 16 has a way newer set of packages as leap 15.6, Wayland + Nvidia should run fine as already hinted by Malcolm.

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Full time wayland user here now on xfce 4.20 with labwc and Hyprland and wayfire with the .run nvidia driver.

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Without any problems:

inxi -Gaz
Graphics:
  Device-1: NVIDIA GA107 [GeForce RTX 3050 8GB] vendor: Micro-Star MSI
    driver: nvidia v: 580.126.18 alternate: nouveau,nvidia_drm non-free: 550.xx+
    status: current (as of 2024-09; EOL~2026-12-xx) arch: Ampere code: GAxxx
    process: TSMC n7 (7nm) built: 2020-2023 pcie: gen: 1 speed: 2.5 GT/s
    lanes: 8 link-max: gen: 4 speed: 16 GT/s lanes: 16 ports:
    active: DP-1,DVI-D-1,HDMI-A-1 empty: none bus-ID: 07:00.0
    chip-ID: 10de:2582 class-ID: 0300
  Device-2: WaveRider USB Live camera driver: snd-usb-audio,uvcvideo
    type: USB rev: 2.0 speed: 480 Mb/s lanes: 1 mode: 2.0 bus-ID: 1-5:2
    chip-ID: 0c46:64ab class-ID: 0102 serial: <filter>
  Display: wayland server: X.org v: 1.21.1.15 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.6
    compositor: kwin_wayland driver: X: loaded: nvidia
    unloaded: modesetting,vesa alternate: fbdev,nouveau,nv gpu: nvidia
    d-rect: 6400x2520 display-ID: 0
  Monitor-1: DP-1 pos: top-center res: 2560x1440 size: N/A modes: N/A
  Monitor-2: DVI-D-1 pos: bottom-r res: 1920x1080 size: N/A modes: N/A
  Monitor-3: HDMI-A-1 pos: bottom-l res: 1920x1080 size: N/A modes: N/A
  API: EGL v: 1.5 hw: drv: nvidia platforms: device: 0 drv: nvidia gbm:
    drv: nvidia surfaceless: drv: nvidia wayland: drv: nvidia x11: drv: nvidia
  API: OpenGL v: 4.6.0 vendor: nvidia v: 580.126.18 glx-v: 1.4
    direct-render: yes renderer: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050/PCIe/SSE2
    memory: 7.81 GiB display-ID: :1.0
  API: Vulkan v: 1.4.309 layers: 4 device: 0 type: discrete-gpu
    name: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 driver: N/A device-ID: 10de:2582
    surfaces: xcb,xlib,wayland
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thanks, I’m getting convinced enough to given wayland a try.

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I used to have these problem issues with a Nvidia Graphics card (rtx 4060) and Wayland. These days Wayland seems to work fine with a nvidia card (although I still use x11).

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Yes, i used to have problems with nvidia on wayland but now there are no problems, I am using the proprietary drivers with the open kernel modules on Hyprland (wayland)

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Been fine for me, I’ve actually been trying to clean install Tumbleweed without X11, which has been proving difficult

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If you’re using a standard desktop install, and don’t use auto-login, you have the option of choosing what kind of session you would like. I have multiple users setup. Rather than playing with Wayland on my main account, which has always used X11, I have a separate account where I test Wayland.

Wayland appears to work just fine with OpenSUSE’s provided new open drivers from-Nvidia (GeForce RTX 3060 on a Plasma6 desktop). For the most part Wayland seems snappier.

The only issues I have with Wayland are:

  • Positions of windows are not saved and restored between logins.
  • Plasma6 on Wayland forces desktop scaling for monitors where the DPI is too small. For example a 27" 4K monitor would be scaled so that it is no longer 4K - 1cm/1inch on screen is no longer 1cm/1inch on paper, and images viewed 100% may not actually be at 100% (depends on viewer DPI awareness). There are unsupported ways of disabling scaling - but being unsupported they may one day break.

For the moment I’m sticking with X11 to avoid the above issues.

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No problems for me using Wayland + the Nvidia proprietary driver for a long time now.

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I even have SDDM on Wayland and it works great.

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my setup for reference sake:

image
image704×212 91.6 KB

I have been using Tumbleweed for quite some time; issues appear here and there all the time, but in the last update I experienced a catastrophic failure of Wayland.

Namely, I have two monitors, and now when I move the cursor of the mouse to the different monitor, the system simply freezes and I cannot even switch to tty.

Switching to X11 helped resolve this issue.

(though might be wrong about it) Using Rust, vibe coding -
There you have it.

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It seems to depend a lot on the compositor and not so much Wayland in general.

I have had no issues with the occasional use of the Xfce 4.20/labwc experimental sessions.

Hyprland, on the other hand, will only launch without freezing 2/5 times. The other three times will cause an immediate system lock up upon login.

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was using Tumbleweed with nvidia gtx1050ti with the graphics drivers provided by opensuse nvidia repositories without problems, except that firefox was running without GPU acceleration in which case i used to compile the va-api driver and did some configs here and there to make it accelerate. On the side note - I am glad that i have switched to AMD gpu since half an year already, everything is so smooth on this side. :slight_smile: