Hi there, I am a very unhappy Nvidia graphics card user and I’m experiencing some obvious issues with my RTX 3080 while using Qubes 4.2.
I don’t have any integrated graphics and I was hoping to ask some more knowledgeable users about how my experience can improve in the future based on the news that NVIDIA has announced.
To be more specific, I wanted to mention that I’m having some serious issues with the open Nouveau driver that comes with the Qubes OS (read: kernel) by default.
I understand that the better nvidia driver won’t help in virtual machines because they don’t use my GPU at all, and that GPU acceleration is still very far from reality, but still I have a bunch of problems in dom0.
My issues include:
- My native screen refresh rate of 165Hz is not supported and is limited to 144 Hz.
- When I shut down my computer, there seems to be some conflict with Plymouth, causing the GUI to not display anything meaningful and the shutdown process to take up to 10 minutes.
- I also feel some strange feelings when looking at the screen, which makes it difficult for me to work. This is not the case with Windows, for example.
- I experience screen tearing.
- Nouveau just sucks, being a reverse-engineered magic.
The problem with a long shutdown can be resolved through the use of the latest kernel, but in this instance, the option for 144 GHz disappears, leaving only 100 GHz and 60 GHz, which is quite disappointing on a 165 GHz matrix and not healthy at all.
Proprietary driver.
It is logical to assume that installing a proprietary driver would help in my situation, but it simply does not work, and after each kernel update, this process must be repeated. I have thoroughly researched the forum on this topic and found several topics on installing the NVIDIA driver. These threads are hopelessly outdated, yet many users have reported that this portion of the guide currently works - Nvidia proprietary driver installation.
I have tried to install the NVIDIA driver on the test system (on a separate drive) for about 10 times with different versions of the driver. Sometimes, I had to reinstall the entire system because of my mistakes and lack of knowledge about how to roll back. Now, I am much better at this process, but the result remains the same - even if the crucial driver starts with X, it only works for 0-10 minutes, and then the X server freezes, sometimes artifacts are present. However, it works at 165 Hz and without visible tiling.
Actually, my question is: what does NVIDIA’s statement about transitioning to open-source kernel modules from version 560 even mean? Will it somehow replace Nouveau and be built into the Linux kernel, or will it be included in Fedora to simply install a package in dom0 and forget about this issue forever? I understand that things like CUDA remain closed, but does this mean NVIDIA cards can be used in Linux as conveniently as AMD and Intel?
Could you please advise me on how I can resolve these issues? I would greatly appreciate any opinions or suggestions you may have. Thank you in advance for your time and consideration.