Plasma/Wayland/Nvidia
Here's how to run with the proprietary Nvidia driver on Wayland:
Prerequisites
To use the Plasma Wayland session:
- Ensure that you are using Plasma 5.20.2 or later — preferably the latest stable release.
- Ensure the NVIDIA driver is not older than version 495.44 — KWin is no longer compatible with previous versions.
- You need an up-to-date Qt. Make sure you have >= Qt5.15.0 or 4bd13402f0293e85b8dfdf92254e250ac28094c7 cherry-picked.
- Make sure to have the Nvidia EGL library installed. For example on Ubuntu and Neon the relevant package is called
libnvidia-egl-wayland1
To use the Plasma Wayland session with hardware acceleration on XWayland apps, you need:
- Xorg 1.20.12 or later.
- XWayland 21.1.2 or later.
- libxcb 1.1.7 or later.
Use the modesetting driver
Check our driver is running in modesettings mode:
cat /sys/module/nvidia_drm/parameters/modeset
It should print "Y". If not, modify your kernel command line and add the line nvidia_drm.modeset=1.
Search for "kernel parameters" in your distribution; https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Kernel_parameters is a good starting point.
It is also possible to pass the parameter via module configuration:
echo options nvidia_drm modeset=1 | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia_drm.conf
You need to regenerate the initramfs in case your distribution provides the graphics drivers in initramfs (e.g. sudo update-initramfs -u)
Login
- Select "Plasma (wayland)" from your login manager
- Enjoy your beautiful super-fast accelerated wayland desktop!
Known Limitations
- Night Color is not applied to the mouse cursor: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=479889
- Poor performance on external screens on hybrid GPU setups when using NVIDIA GPU as a secondary GPU because it requires CPU copying from the primary GPU to the secondary GPU (see https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/1031, https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=452219)