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.
On Debian the older Nvidia GPU would still work fine with the default Nouveau driver (open source non-Nvidia), I think(?) it’d be the same on Kubuntu/Ubuntu. Since it was an upgrade maybe you just need to re-enable Nouveau on your system? It’s not something I’ve ever done but doing a quick online search came up with some instructions here https://gist.github.com/vredchenko/42381e9cff3f1e162cb47cfd6479c459 , it looks more or less correct I’d just double-check before rebooting that Nouveau is not being blacklisted in /etc/modprobe.d
You could try that & see how it goes before doing anything more drastic. You’re not going to do any heavy gaming with Nouveau but it should handle day-to-day tasks fine.