We are a Hollywood studio and therefore all of our workstations are Rocky Linux 9.5 + Davinci Resolve. We attempted to migrate to Rocky Linux 9.5 KDE and discovered the hard way that for some reason, the RPMfusion kmod, akmod, and even the nVidia official drivers (open-dkms and latest-dkms) do not work with KDE Rocky. The RPMfusion mods (akmod and kmod) install, however, there is a significant mouse lag/frame loss/unusable performance issue) and the nVidia official drivers install, however, after login, it just boots into a black screen of death or a frozen screen with the mouse arrow frozen in the middle of it.
Our systems are running AMD Threadripper CPUs + Gigabyte TRX50 + 128 GB RAM in each system. It’s definitely not a performance issue, rather, a bug with the nVidia drivers running on KDE Rocky. Our GPUs are MSI nVidia RTX 4090s. The systems are also equipped with 25 Gbps fiber cards in them.
We were able to immediately resolve the issue by switching to the Rocky Workstation (Gnome) distro. The official nVidia drivers (latest-dkms) are the only ones that work perfectly with it. We would like to move to the KDE Plasma edition of Rocky if at all possible if anyone has gotten the nVidia drivers to work with it and can tell me how to fix this.
I get my nvidia drivers from nvidia, and I’m currently using the open driver.
I’ve just rebooted one of my RL9 machines after upgrading it’s kernel, and it came back fine (and I’m kde only). I’m about to reboot this system (another RL9/KDE system), once the dnf update completes.
I have had to completely remove the nvidia drivers and reinstall (using nvidia instructions), but that’s few and far between.
I just do the NVIDIA setup, it’s been pretty straightforward. It was (in the past) a lot less clean, but now with the CUDA development kit, it’s been pretty clean.
Thanks Mike. Do you think this is less of a Rocky KDE + nVidia issue then and more to do with something else? E.g. the AMD Threadripper or our specific RTX 4080 card since its working for you? What nVidia card are you using? RTX 4080 as well?
I suspect the RPM fusion. NVIDIA is updating things rapidly, and the external sites have a hard time keeping up.
However, I have had to clean out all the nvidia, and install from scratch a few times, so I do them one at a time to make sure there isn’t a kernel upgrade that causes and NVIDIA hiccup.
It’s been a while since I had to do that, but I’m cautious.
If you have a question about which flavor of nvidia driver, let me know. Your AMD is an x86_64 machine, I’m assuming, so we’re in the same kernel world?
So, I have a few different types, but none are the RTX-4080..
what is the output of nvidia-driver-assistant? Mine ends with:
Please copy and paste the following command to install the open kernel module flavour:
sudo dnf -y module install nvidia-driver:open-dkms
Not sure if this is available with the RPMFusion setup, but it certainly is with the NVIDIA setup. This is what should tell you the correct setup (or lack of same) to match your graphics card.
There is a MatterMost SIG/VFX channel where you might find some help from people in your industry. It doesn’t have a lot of traffic, but it might be worth trying. I just got a 5070 Ti on a new ryzen 9 9950x build, but I’m waiting on the PS to arrive, so I’ll be having to deal with this issue myself soon enough. Are you using Wayland or X on your install?
If case you don’t want to join in MatterMost (chat), i’m posting a link there to this post so maybe someone there might help.
I want to thank all of you for jumping in and trying to assist. I cross-posted this to the RockyLinux forum at Reddit and was given the idea to look at this potentially being related to either the login manager (SDDM versus GDM) or potentially Wayland versus X. However, I’m not quite sure I agree this is a Wayland issue since both Gnome Rocky and KDE Rocky both use Wayland. I looked into the nuances between the two and it looks to be the login manager and the Window Manager/Compositer (KWin versus Mutter). Do any of you think it might be one over the other? I’ll first try reinstalling Rocky KDE again and switch the login manager to GDM. If that doesn’t fix it, since it isn’t really possible to switch the WM/compositer, I’m not sure what else to try.
@tunaboy Yes, in both scenarios, I wasn’t able to get the RPMfusion (akmod and kmod) or the ELrepo versions working. The only working scenario was Gnome Rocky + the official nvidia driver.
IRMO of my CPU, correct. When I followed the Nvidia instructions, I always used the RHEL9/x86_64 URI.
Have you compared errors that might show in journalctl -b -p err immediately after booting in one or the other? Just a “low hanging fruit” and quick way to possibly catch some baseline state to start from. You could parse the journal for other messages, warnings, etc too of course.
@robbott correct. When I followed the instructions from nVidia’s install guide, I used the RHEL9/x86_64 URI.
Question, since KDE uses Wayland as does Gnome, would errors still be sent to that Xorg log?
Interesting, the nvidia driver I was able to get working Gnome Rocky was the latest-dkms URI, not open-dkms. Though, in all fairness, I stopped trying after I got latest-dkms working. I wanted to use that one when I switched from KDE Rocky to Gnome since it’s what is recommended in Rocky Linux’s official install guide in its docs section.
@NezSez thank you for the idea.. I’m going to give KDE Rocky another go today. A Reddit user recommended trying to switch to GDM since that’s the login Gnome Rocky uses. If it doesn’t fix it, I’ll export the journalctl output to a text file and post it here for help if I can’t see anything.
@NezSez I appreciate you, thanks. I’ll check it out as well.
I’m just using the default after install (Wayland). Trying to keep everything at default when troubleshooting so I don’t introduce any user-created errors.
Blockquote I looked into the nuances between the two and it looks to be the login manager and the Window Manager/Compositer (KWin versus Mutter). Do any of you think it might be one over the other? I’ll first try reinstalling Rocky KDE again and switch the login manager to GDM.
So, I have to say I have gdm running as the login manager, not sddm.
I started this with the Rocky 9 when it was only officially gdm, then on that and subsequent machines, installed as a standard (workstation, if I recall correctly) install, and after it was up and running did the group install of “KDE (K Desktop Environment)”. I notice that I also have the gnome desktop environment installed also. For clarity, here is what groups I’ve got installed:
Blockquote
% dnf group list
Last metadata expiration check: 0:00:09 ago on Sat 19 Apr 2025 02:43:56 PM PDT.
Available Environment Groups:
Server with GUI
Server
Minimal Install
Custom Operating System
Virtualization Host
Installed Environment Groups:
Workstation
KDE Plasma Workspaces
Installed Groups:
Fedora Packager
Xfce
Legacy UNIX Compatibility
Console Internet Tools
RPM Development Tools
Scientific Support
Security Tools
System Tools
GNOME Desktop Environment
Hardware Support
KDE (K Desktop Environment)
Available Groups:
VideoLAN Client
Container Management
Development Tools
.NET Development
Graphical Administration Tools
Headless Management
Network Servers
Smart Card Support
Games and Entertainment
Graphical Internet
Sound and Video
Random question. When I worked in Hollywood industry doing IT, we had strict security settings. If I were there now, I would expect fapolicyd, usbguard, and other configs to be blocking the nvidia part. Also authselect has hosed me in the past when loggin into a system. I would do an “authselect check” via ssh and it would show a ton of issues.
When I was struggling with nVidia’s drivers recently (wow I have some regrets not going AMD+Linux, here), I ended up using the Negativo repo. I kept having the rpmfusion and Nvidia .run ones fail after updating, but things have been solid since switching over: Nvidia driver, CUDA tools and libraries – negativo17.org
NVidia admits that their driver has issues with Wayland. See /usr/share/doc/nvidia-driver/README.txt (or wherever your method of install placed the docs that come with NVidia driver).