Will Plasma 6.2.4 run under X11?

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1

Not sure if this is a question for this forum or for Fedora. I’ve been testing Fedora 41 with Plasma for about a week now. Some annoyances here and there but the biggest problem is stability.

I get lots of UI lockups, when customizing the panel mostly, but often random freezes, notifications constantly popup about something crashing, apps hang and crash randomly, I had to hard-reset my PC several times already because the UI was frozen and I couldn’t kill or restart plasma because “plasma dumped core” or something. Then I installed a Steam game, Planetary Annihilation, total lockups and I remember I used to be able to run this game on Linux in the past just fine, playing videos in VLC is also problematic, I often get a black frame and I have to restart VLC, dragging other apps over VLC also makes it stutter sometimes.

When searching for soultions people seem to believe these are related to Wayland. This is actually the first time I got anything on Wayland to run for more than few hours, it was always a total disaster.

I also have an NVIDIA GPU and this is the main reason I picked Fedora 41 because it makes it easier to install latest NVIDIA drivers.

So yeah, will Plasma 6.2.4 work with X11? I hope there is a way to install Fedora KDE with 11.

Thank you

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2

This will be a Fedora thing. Most distros seem to include the bits needed for an x11 login session by default, and iirc Fedora doesn’t. I think that you just need to install them

3

This is an NVIDIA issue. No Distro or desktop can fix this.

There are various drivers

  • nouveau: old FOSS
  • nova: new FOSS with proprietary firmware
  • NVIDIA old: proprietary drivers
  • NVIDIA new: opensource with proprietary firmware

All these only work together with the proprietary firmware of the GPUs, but I wanted to stress it’s presence on the opensource drivers.

I never have any Wayland issues on Intel, and little (mostly suspend related) on an AMD laptop.

You should try and file bug reports, find out which drivers you can use and fix it this way. X11 is only in rough maintenance mode

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4

To reiterate what others have stated, this is a Fedora thing - Fedora doesn’t have the packages installed allowing for an X11 session by default.

Running Nvidia under an X11 session just fine here using KDE Neon.

5

As someone who’s using Fedora 41, Wayland session and an Nvidia card nearly problem-free… I know some of it may be due to luck with my specific configuration, but there are some things that would be worth checking before planning a switch to X11:

  • How did you install the Nvidia drivers?
  • Have you disabled the GSP firmware?

Those are probably more appropriate topics for the Fedora Discussion forum, as folks have said, but I wanted to mention those as topics to include in posts there to help diagnose.

6

If anyone wants a completely problem free Wayland experience, then swap out the Nvidia GPU for an AMD one; even onboard Intel graphics does better than Nvidia in terms of supporting the newer display server better.

X11 is essentially dead now. Time to move on. The KDE experience with Wayland is just better at this point. And with the right hardware (not Nvidia), it’s very smooth. That’s where things are at right now. Best part? AMD and Intel is basically plug and play on Linux. No messing with drivers.

Sometimes, you have to go out of your way to get the right hardware for the job; especially if having stability is your goal. Now, I know Nvidia fans don’t want to hear it (for reference, I was an Nvidia user; so spare me), but it’s the way things are.

9

X11 is essentially dead now. Time to move on. The KDE experience with Wayland is just better at this point.

Not for me. Wayland decided that I shouldn’t be allowed to do stuff that I’ve done for years, and now I have to wait for plasma’s compositor to support that stuff. Until I get it I’m staying on X11.

10

Well, X11 will most likely be dead by then. Up to you. There is a reason why KDE defaulted to Wayland at the start of Plasma 6. You’ll have to accept it one way or another. Or, you might have to use another desktop environment where the devs plan to make no further developments. The popular desktops are going to Wayland whether anyone likes it or not. Just how it is.

12

My experiences exactly.

As someone with a 27" 4k monitor, I’m still waiting for the latest round of KDE Wayland fractional scaling updates to be pushed. ATM fractional scaling under Wayland still isn’t quite there yet, and that has nothing to do with Nvidia hardware/drivers.

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Still on Nvidia? Well, keep waiting to have a stable Wayland experience.

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No matter what you want to claim, all this tells me is you haven’t used Nvidia hardware/drivers in quite some time.

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Yeah. 3 years. Not long. Sorry to burst your bubble.

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To reiterate…

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No such option.

My own experience contradicts your statement. This far from anything remotely “better” unless you mean experience with Wayland in the past which yeah, was “extremely terrible”, now it’s only “terrible” so I guess that might be described as “better”.

Especially? So, you suggest there are people for whom stability is not a goal? Also, what is exactly wrong with my hardware? What kind of unobtanium hardware am I supposed to get to get Wayland to work smoothly?

Yup, I was absolutely expecting this sort of reply. It’s always either “NVIDIA’s fault” or “your fault”.

No, I have zero interest in AMD hardware.

Anyway… Let’s see if anything actually constructive was posted…

Yeah, I guess it’s time for another wipe and reinstall :slight_smile: I tried to install X11 on Fedora 41 last night but it seems the bits are gone from the repositories or blocked out somehow. The only reason I picked Fedora 41 was because it was supposed to be “good for NVIDIA”. I think Nobara, a gaming centered distro, is based on Fedora. I also kind of like Plasma for its customiziability (with some notable annoyances).

I may try Debian with KDE again, but I had a really hard time installing NVIDIA drivers on Debian. Kubuntu is out because of tight snap integration. Are there any other distros with KDE Plasma worth trying? My only other option would be Cinnamon, but I’d much rather get Plasma to work. But Mint Cinnamon was the only distro that I got my games and stuff to work well with NVIDIA 555 drivers nd with minimal tinkering.

Yeah, thanks for crapping all over the thread instead of providing constructive feedback. People like you are a part of why switching to Linux is difficult.

Indeed. Too many people like dreaperxz in the Linux community. Thanks to other who provided actual feedback.

26

OK, so the reason I failed to install X11 last night was because NVIDIA drivers needed to be uninstalled first. Reboot. Install plasma-workspace-x11. Reinstall the latest NVIDIA drivers and all seems good now. Running Plasma 6.2.4 under X11:

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I noticed something strange though.

This is the NVIDIA Settings app before, under Wayland:

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This is the NVIDA Settings now, under X11:

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Now, to do some testing, install some games. I’ll report back later. The first thing I noticed already though is that VLC video playback is smoother. I can drag other windows, Firefox, Tunderbird, Krita over VLC playing video with no hiccups, even overlap two VLC windows, both playing video. This was resulting in stutter before.

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Nvidia X Server settings are only fully implemented under X11 at this point in time.

29

OK, so this is normal, thank you. I was wondering if perhaps something was missing or broken and that caused my Wyaland woes.

30

All perfectly normal. :+1:

34

My top beef with Ubuntu is that Canonical behaves like any big corp these days, you get ads when you ssh to an Ubuntu server and they require an Ubuntu account to get all security patches. The ads can be easily removed but that’s not the point, I can remove all crap from Windows too. The point is that the company thinks it’s a good idea in the first place and this is the kind of stuff I want to get away from by dropping Windows.

Then the snaps integration. I just don’t get snaps, always have problems with them. And if you remove snapd, then try something like apt install firefox, it will reinstall snapd and then install snap Firefox. This smells like what Microsoft is doing and I’m tired of fighting Microsoft and I don’t want to fight another company over the control of my system. I’m old and grumpy.

I started with Ubuntu because I simply didn’t know any better. Everybody said Ubuntu was great.

So, for the servers I want to go with Debian. I already tested it, works great. I only run Pihole, Nextloud, webserver and simple SMB, NFS fileserver, nothing fancy.

But my testing of Debian on the desktop ended up in a lot frustration due to difficulties with NVIDIA and old Plasma, it was simply beyond my abilities to get it to work. Some say that Debian is the worst distro for NVIDIA owners.

Then I tried Fedora, it was supposed to be good and it’s kind of is, except for the default Wayland integration.

I get it that NVIDIA is a problem but stupid fanboi bickering doesn’t help anyone and some people immediately start crapping on NVIDIA. NVIDIA GPUs are objectively better, even AMD agreed by leaving the high-end desktop market segment. They’re just out-teched by NVIDIA by far.

So, if I was building a PC for Linux from scratch I would have gone all-AMD. But I already have two fairly recent PCs with NVIDIA GPUs and I’m not gonna get rid of them. If I can’t get this to work then I will simply stay on Windows for the time being.

My best experience was with Mint, which is based in Ubuntu with snapd removed and their own Cinnamon UI. Cinnamon is quite nice but somewhat limited, I like Plasma better despite some of it annoyances. KDE also makes some nice apps but they often don’t play nice with Cinnamon.

So, my goal is to get Plasma to work well on “some” distro. I’m not sure if I have enough energy and willpower though :slight_smile:

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No fan boy bickering I just stated experience with them, granted that was many many years ago. But in that time since then I have seen nothing but the same reports from people who use them. For Firefox download the .tar.bz file from the mozilla website extract it to put it your /home/user_name/bin directory if you have one and run it from there with it uninstalled from the system. It runs flawlessly doing this and has for as many years as I have done it. Forget how many now it has been forever really. Keep at it I am sure you will find one that will work with the nvidia though best to leave the kernel updating out of the picture this is where most all the problems are with it I see.