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)