NVIDIA killed my Cinnamon

Update:

Bumblebee is not necessary anymore on recent Fedora versions. I followed the NVIDIA Guide from RPM Fusion and I could achieve even faster frame rates that way. The only drawback is a not so memorable prefix for starting Steam games (or other applications).

So the primusrun command is now exchanged with: __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia %command% Which is a tad longer and more ugly, but it’s working faster. And of course there are always ways like aliases or wrappers to make it cleaner.

Another information I didn’t provide before is that NVIDIA acceleration and Wayland don’t work together nicely. So for no using X11 is unfortunately still the way to go.

Original content:

Some random package upgrades got my Cinnamon login on Ubuntu 18.04 getting stuck. I tried literally everything I could find in the interwebs but nothing helped. Fortunately “Ubuntu on Wayland” session was still working, so I could do last backups and tasks.

Afterwards I decided to install Fedora with KDE spin since I decided to get faster but still stable updates and Gnome feels really old nowadays. After I set up everything I cried a little at the frame rate when starting Steam games and Minecraft, so I went for setting up the NVIDIA graphics drivers again. And again, I wasted hours to get it working. Wasn’t it quite easy on Ubuntu previously? Then I learned about NVIDIA Optimus. The name itself oozes irony. Even Linus Torvalds only had a middle finger to spare for their semi-cool Linux implementation. Optimus is for seamless switching between an onboard Intel graphics adapter and a dedicated NVIDIA graphics card. On the default setup, the nouveau drivers do a pretty good job but the frame rate for 3D applications is sad. In the end, I only got the NVIDIA drivers working with bumblebee and have to start every game with optirun -b none prefix. Yes, optirun -b primus or primusrun doesn’t give me the same framerate as none does. This is only because primusrun, which is recommended to use, properly limit frame rate to the notebook screen AFAICT. For Steam, I had to change the launch options for every game to primusrun %command%. With Steam providing Proton to use most Windows games under Linux I thought about getting rid of Windows completely, but NVIDIA did their good part to defend Windows raison d’être.

I’m not really sure if I’ll stay on KDE, since it feels pretty bloated, but Fedora’s package management with dnf is great. And I hate snap.