I have a Ubuntu 24.10 system with 2 4K displays and 2 1080P displays using X11 Plasma 6.1.5 which has been kind of stable for the last few months. My display driver is Nvidia 565.56.01 and the video card is RTX 4070TI Super
This afternoon Plasma suddenly decided to forget about my second 4K display and it ends up in sleep state.
I use SDDM to pick my desktop and both displays work there. If I pick Gnome X11 both displays work there. Both displays work with Windows 11.
I didn’t try Plasma Wayland because that is even less stable than Plasma X11.
If I try to configure desktop in Plasma X11 it doesn’t let me configure that display there either.
So how do I get my second display back?
Since nobody has suggested ho I can get my second 4K display that suddenly stopped working with X11 Plasma Desktop I decided to try Wayland Plasma desktop again to see if it might have picked up some updates as part of applying updates to my Ubuntu system.
It’s still very far from ready for prime time.
I get pretty frequent occurrences of the desktop being blocked. Mouse clicks are ignored and I can’t switch application windows. Sometimes I can clear this by hitting CTRL-ALT-F6 then CTRL-ALT-F1 to toggle between a text console and the desktop but then it happens again a little while later.
I have QT-based applications which remember their position and size with X11. That no longer works with Wayland.
I use the Eclipse IDE for development. If I click an item in the menu bar, like the help menu, Wayland initially shows me the File menu then I have to mouse over to the help menu or whatever other menu I want.
I’m trying to run the NVidia ncu-ui profiler an an application I’m writing and that’s a complete failure. When I start it, a dialog appears with text that is way-oversized for the dialog, something like a 40 point font when what’s configured is 9 points, and no way to resize the dialog. The same thing with the ncu-ui menu bar. The text is like 40 point font, but only the first one or two menu options are selectable. Anything else does not respond. Maybe the mouse thinks the menu font is 9 point and it is confused.
So another couple hours wasted dealing with busted software.
Finally, I tried Gnome Wayland desktop, which I do not like because it’s too limited and some of the suggested extensions to make it better did not work.
ncu-ui works better there.
But then repeatedly logging out and back into different desktops where something works in only one desktop is not productive.
Thought about this a bit more.
With Plasma X11 running nvidia-settings refused to show me the missing display.
I switched to Gnome X11 and ran nvidia-settings. The display was there but marked disabledd.
I enabled it and went back to Plasma X11. Now nvidia-settings showed me all 4 displays but the positioning and rotation was wrong so I fixed that.
Then I had all4 displays working on Plasma X11 again but the Plasma display positioning was wrong.
I cleaned that up and was back to my original working state with 4 displays.
I have no idea why Plasma decided I had only 3 displays.
I have no idea why nvidia-settings could see only 4 displays with Plasma but could see all 4 with Gnome.
I have no idea why there seems to be two sets of layout settings, nvidia-settings and Plasma settings but there sure seems to be since what I had in Plasma display settings did not match what I set in nvidia-settings and my setup still wasn’t right until I fixed my Plasma desktop configuration.
And even after the Wayland project running for some 15 years, it’s still nowhere near ready for prime time.
Hi - given the breadth of different issues that you seem to be encountering…I wonder if it might be worth trying out a live USB or dual boot of a different Linux distribution? Perhaps one that packages more up-to-date overall software, like Fedora, Arch, Tumbleweed, etc., might help?
Just an idea, as at least in my personal experience, having software that’s closer to the upstream versions - especially on newer devices - seems to help the overall experience?
I switched from Fedora to Ubuntu because Ubuntu was claimed to be ‘better’ and is the distribution that is claimed to be the supported distribution for NVIDIA CUDA software. I had been running Fedora since when it was the free Red Hat version 4.0 or so and that was rock solid. By comparison running Ubuntu for the last 6 months has been amateur hour.
The downside is that Fedora is more bleeding edge and it’s easy to run into system software like gcc and python that get too far ahead of what CUDA and AI software depend on and then having to manage that.
Guess I need to think harder about this because I’m pretty fed up with the Ubuntu distribution.
Thanks for replying.
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Ubuntu definitely has its uses, and can work well in the right situation. Personally, I just ended up finding more difficulty than ease in trying to get recent hardware and software to work well, and its release model means you typically have to wait for months (on the interim releases) or years (on LTS releases) to receive upstream improvements in things like KDE software.
I am definitely no expert at all on this, but it is technically possible with Fedora to run the “n-1” version, since Fedora supports both a current and previous release (right now, 41 and 40 respectively). If some of those core system components are moving a bit too quickly in the current release for software from other repositories like CUDA, perhaps the prior Fedora version might lag behind enough to work well there?