I have an older gaming PC that has an Nvidia GTX 1060. Until I updated it to Kubuntu 26.04 and Plasma 6.6 it was working perfectly. Not exactly a powerhouse, for sure, but decent enough to play games like Horizon Zero Dawn at medium settings.
Since I’ve upgraded, it’s now in a situation where if the GPU is active, there’s no display, or I can use software rendering to get into the desktop, but the GPU can’t do anything. But not both. If I can get to the desktop and search journalctl for kwin_wayland_wrapper, I get an error along these lines:
kwin\_wayland\_wrapper\[2921]: kwin\_scene\_opengl: Error during eglInitialize "EGL\_NOT\_INITIALIZED"
The Nvidia driver is 580.142, which I’ve tried to roll back to a previous one to test if that’ll work, but apt tells me that 580 is literally the only driver available. I have also completely purged and reinstalled the driver, just in case it hadn’t installed properly, but that didn’t help.
Is it fair to say that my GPU is pretty much dead under the new drivers? And if so, will I have to reinstall, either with a previous version of Kubuntu, or more likely switch it across to Arch?
Sorry if there’s any info I’ve not included, I’ve kinda been picking about the internet, trying to figure out what’s gone wrong with it, and don’t really know where to start.
I’m using GTX980 on CachyOS with non open 580.142 driver which gets installed automatically if you are on an older Nvidia card, it works perfectly fine.
Nouveau driver crashes when anything more complex than a wallpaper is trying to render (literally, even context menus and taskbar icon names).
Did not try the open version.
Worth mentioning, Cachy and most other distros seem to use Nouveau in their live ISOs, so you’ll have to use nomodeset on Cachy and an alternative way to boot without GPU drivers on other distros.