Most of this article seems unnecessary in 2025 and is very specific to Arch.
For most distributions you can simply install the (proprietary) nvidia drivers and you're good to go.
There is generally no tweaking or command line changes necessary for Nvidia to work on Wayland, including multi-monitors with different resolutions and refresh rates.
I have an intel/nvida 4080 pc and im running a regular Arch install, rocking KDE on Wayland. It works flawlessly, just installed the drivers and that was that. Stop inventing problems that do not exist.
It feels surprising that there's people on hackernews without adblock considering that adblock is not just for blocking ads, but also malware, illegal tracking and blocking annoying and useless banners.
brave seems to have some special sauce since it appears to be able to hide the fact that ads were removed. I am guessing they are doing so without triggering dom events.
Well I run an ad blocker too, but maybe we should try browsing submitted URLs without blocking ads and only upvote them IF we can still read them like that.
My browser automatically blocked something that's triggering an overlay to "Disable any DNS / Extension Based AdBlocker to Continue" with no option to dismiss.
So the people on Hackernews with adblock aren't reading this.
You can do that now, and for at least the last year.
Very few games don't work anymore, and most that don't are using kernel level anti-cheat or are generally hostile to users anyways (Fortnite and Destiny 2 could work, but they actively block Linux).
I main Fedora with an Nvidia 3080 and haven't had issues for quite some time now.
I'd just go AMD. The drivers there are much more mature due to Google and Valve contributions, and the performance of an 9070 XT is great while being cheaper than the equivalent 5070 Ti. FSR4 is a solid competitor to DLSS and works in any game that supports FSR 3.1.
Anti-cheats won't work, I keep a Windows drive just for Battlefield 6.
I got fed up about a week ago and ditched my Nvidia GPU for a 9070XT.
I run CachyOS and have been having a nightmare of a time on Wayland with my 3D Printer slicer and other tools I use my computer for being unusable.
The only thing that has ever kept me on Nvidia all these years is that they have been killing AMD performance wise for gaming.
The 9070XT is easily performant enough for the gaming I'm doing at the moment, and I can finally ditch the last major headache I've had in two and a half decades of being a Linux user - NVIDIA drivers - good riddance.
I don't play online games other than Helldivers 2 (so anti-cheat is a non-issue) which is working just fine at 70-80FPS max settings in 4K. Also getting good performance with RT off playing Ghostwire in 4K with settings as high as I can get them while staying above 60 FPS with Freesync.
EDIT: 9070XT seems to have a bit of headroom too I got the Asus PRIME OC version; Using LACT I upped the power limit from the stock 317W to 340W and undervolted by -100mv (YMMV on this value) and can get a decent chunk of extra performance out of it.
I'd probably say at least Gold is "reliably click and play without fiddling", so probably we're around 20-50% there right now, if we consider the top 10 games on Steam. Once you start considering top 100 or top 1000, it starts to look a lot better. But still, mainstream games are lagging seemingly.
I can run 99% on Linux + AMD + X11, on Ubuntu 24. The only problematic one is Witcher 3 which insists on Wayland which breaks everything else. Even the UT5 titles work well enough, but then again our gaming is not your gaming and you might be more demanding that we are.
I'm trying to recall how NVidia behaved for games, but my daily driver is an old 1050 Ti that's been rock solid for years now, also X11.
I don't even know when I ran into a game that didn't run off Steam on Linux. There's some fiddling gamescope on Wayland to get them to perform well, but most just run out of the box with great performance.
The stuff that doesn't work typically don't work because kernel level anticheats, so a few competitive titles but even in that space many titles still run.
It has been my experience that this is currently the case. I haven't had to even open protondb or search for a workaround in over a year. The only titles I know that don't work are a handful of multiplayer games that have intentionally disabled linux support.
Many of the replies completely missed the part about Nvidia, sigh.
I unfortunately still see a lot of Proton bug reports that don’t repro on AMD cards. Hoping that improves soon, I’m sure Valve would love to tell hardware makers that Nvidia GPUs are supported.
Games I've played on my Arch Linux desktop with a 4090 in the past few months: Clair Obscur, Disco Elysium, Outer Worlds, Red Dead Redemption 2, Cyberpunk, Dispatch, Silent Hill f, FFVII Rebirth. I haven't had a single issue with any of these games. What games do you think will struggle? I can give them a shot if I own then and let you know how they do.
I have an nvidia card on catchyos with catchyos proton and I have not ran into a single game that does not run, well ok some only walk, but that's also a problem on AMD.
I am excluding games that rely on a kernelmode anticheat.
I'd wager that 95% of Steam titles does run on Linux. Admittedly some big and popular games use invasive anti-cheat that's not supported, but they're less than 5%.
Having failed to get Wayland working on Debian Trixie with a 1050 Ti as an upgrade from X11, I've given up for now and will try again when I switch to AMD. This is a workstation not used for games so it'd be good to have Wayland working right but I'm not wasting time fighting it, and it'll get the GPU from the gaming rig when it becomes due nullifying the problem.
What I don't get is if these are proscribed steps (and they do read as such) why are they not automated with the module install? Why are we still fighting these issues if the 'workaround' is linear and well described? Is it as flimsy a reason as "write-an-article, collect-advertising-revenue" rather than contribute code to the installer?
I think for me jetbrains applications cause a memory leak in KWin which actually is becoming less of a problem now that I am switching to neovim slowly but surely.
To be clearer, as each wayland desktop pretty much creates their own incompatible wayland compositor (because wayland protocol is minimal and not feature complete) this is just a guide to fixing the hyperland broken wayland desktop. Not all waylands' broken desktops.
This is an incomplete list of protocols that aren't part of core Wayland. Compositors implement additional protocols that aren't even part of this process (e.g. wlr-screencopy-unstable). See the wlroota protocols here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/tree/master...
Right but there's the xdg-portal for screen capture which runs through Pipewire and supports sand-boxing (because its negotiated over dbus), which all the main compositors support.
Just because a protocol isn't part of Wayland, doesn't mean a standard protocol does not exists.
nvidia on linux [for desktop] is utterly broken.
I ran nvidia cards for almost 15 years (shame on me): laggy X11 compositing, fragile and broken wayland. Broken suspend/resume.
Too many moving parts (selected drivers, modprobe quirks, suspend/resume scripts).
Moved to amd: slick x11, reliable wayland, NO MORE DRIVERS AT ALL, works like charm.
And yes, I do playing in Linux.
ChromeOS is a far better "Grandma" distribution than Windows or MacOS. Linux is simultaneously both the most Grandma friendly and least Grandma friendly, including every point in between.
You need to compare apples to apples, aka pre-installed vendor supported operating systems. If you're comparing installing an unsupported OS on unsupported hardware, Linux is far superior. Try installing MacOS on a Windows computer or Windows on a Mac if you're truly masochistic.
Are you saying windows and macos do not have any bugs? I have news for you.
Also wevare talking here about archlinux + hyperland compositor, not the typical Fedora, Mint or Ubunti/Zorin distro. Tinkerer's gonna tinker while the other users just use their computer regardless of the OS.
Linux isn't a single OS. It's hundreds of different and weird combinations.
There are Linux distributions that are better than Windows or iOS for grandma to use as well as distributions where you need to be an expert to do anything.
It doesn't matter, your options are either X11 or a Wayland-based compositor, both of them come with their respective headaches that a regular user has NO IDEA how to fix.
Most of this article seems unnecessary in 2025 and is very specific to Arch.
For most distributions you can simply install the (proprietary) nvidia drivers and you're good to go.
There is generally no tweaking or command line changes necessary for Nvidia to work on Wayland, including multi-monitors with different resolutions and refresh rates.
My "gaming" laptop is completely effed on most distributions, and forces me to use Linux Mint to select an older driver (which also causes problems.)
that sounds like a firmware issue rather than a driver one, laptops are known to have horrible apic including on windows (ex: asus laptops). https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive
I assume you have 2 GPUs and one is integrated?
I have an intel/nvida 4080 pc and im running a regular Arch install, rocking KDE on Wayland. It works flawlessly, just installed the drivers and that was that. Stop inventing problems that do not exist.
Careful there, I was almost able to see some parts of the article through the ads
The terminal screenshots are terrible, too. They're using a non-monospace font and the kerning is messed up, making everything double-wide.
Came to say something about the ads too. Ended up not even reading the article it was so bad.
It feels surprising that there's people on hackernews without adblock considering that adblock is not just for blocking ads, but also malware, illegal tracking and blocking annoying and useless banners.
HN has many ad-apologists. It's more ironic than surprising that there's complaints.
Totally agree. Every time I see someone complaining about ads, I think "What ads?"
Their adblock shamming overlay is also blocking part of the screen (on mobile) by the way
Don't see that overlay on fennec + adblock, what are you using?
brave seems to have some special sauce since it appears to be able to hide the fact that ads were removed. I am guessing they are doing so without triggering dom events.
Well I run an ad blocker too, but maybe we should try browsing submitted URLs without blocking ads and only upvote them IF we can still read them like that.
I take a similar approach, but with noscript. If you cannot read it without enabling js, then I won't read the article.
My browser automatically blocked something that's triggering an overlay to "Disable any DNS / Extension Based AdBlocker to Continue" with no option to dismiss.
So the people on Hackernews with adblock aren't reading this.
I was able to read it perfectly while using uBlock.
no overlay here on fennec + ublock.
Reader mode also available but not even needed.
I did not get this on Firefox mobile using uBlock and JavaScript disabled.
interesting, on brave such popup never came up.
When can I reliably run ~95% of Steam titles on Linux with a Nvidia card? That's what I'm waiting for, then it's bye-bye Windows.
You can do that now, and for at least the last year.
Very few games don't work anymore, and most that don't are using kernel level anti-cheat or are generally hostile to users anyways (Fortnite and Destiny 2 could work, but they actively block Linux).
I main Fedora with an Nvidia 3080 and haven't had issues for quite some time now.
I'd just go AMD. The drivers there are much more mature due to Google and Valve contributions, and the performance of an 9070 XT is great while being cheaper than the equivalent 5070 Ti. FSR4 is a solid competitor to DLSS and works in any game that supports FSR 3.1.
Anti-cheats won't work, I keep a Windows drive just for Battlefield 6.
I got fed up about a week ago and ditched my Nvidia GPU for a 9070XT.
I run CachyOS and have been having a nightmare of a time on Wayland with my 3D Printer slicer and other tools I use my computer for being unusable.
The only thing that has ever kept me on Nvidia all these years is that they have been killing AMD performance wise for gaming.
The 9070XT is easily performant enough for the gaming I'm doing at the moment, and I can finally ditch the last major headache I've had in two and a half decades of being a Linux user - NVIDIA drivers - good riddance.
I don't play online games other than Helldivers 2 (so anti-cheat is a non-issue) which is working just fine at 70-80FPS max settings in 4K. Also getting good performance with RT off playing Ghostwire in 4K with settings as high as I can get them while staying above 60 FPS with Freesync.
EDIT: 9070XT seems to have a bit of headroom too I got the Asus PRIME OC version; Using LACT I upped the power limit from the stock 317W to 340W and undervolted by -100mv (YMMV on this value) and can get a decent chunk of extra performance out of it.
I use Debian 13 with an Nvidia 50 series card and I’m able to play games fine. Currently playing ARC Raiders and it works great.
I think there are still some common anti cheats that don’t work. But single player has been flawless for me.
https://www.protondb.com/dashboard
> Top 10 - 20% Platinum - 30% Gold - 10% Silver - 30% Bronze - 10% Borked
I'd probably say at least Gold is "reliably click and play without fiddling", so probably we're around 20-50% there right now, if we consider the top 10 games on Steam. Once you start considering top 100 or top 1000, it starts to look a lot better. But still, mainstream games are lagging seemingly.
Wait no longer! Per capita I doubt 5% of games use kernel-level anticheat. Almost anything else runs pretty painlessly.
I can run 99% on Linux + AMD + X11, on Ubuntu 24. The only problematic one is Witcher 3 which insists on Wayland which breaks everything else. Even the UT5 titles work well enough, but then again our gaming is not your gaming and you might be more demanding that we are.
I'm trying to recall how NVidia behaved for games, but my daily driver is an old 1050 Ti that's been rock solid for years now, also X11.
Maybe the problem is Wayland not NVidia?
I don't even know when I ran into a game that didn't run off Steam on Linux. There's some fiddling gamescope on Wayland to get them to perform well, but most just run out of the box with great performance.
The stuff that doesn't work typically don't work because kernel level anticheats, so a few competitive titles but even in that space many titles still run.
It has been my experience that this is currently the case. I haven't had to even open protondb or search for a workaround in over a year. The only titles I know that don't work are a handful of multiplayer games that have intentionally disabled linux support.
I play everything in Ubuntu on my 4080
From CS2 (native) to the Final Fantasy XV demo (not native) and everywhere in between
Many of the replies completely missed the part about Nvidia, sigh.
I unfortunately still see a lot of Proton bug reports that don’t repro on AMD cards. Hoping that improves soon, I’m sure Valve would love to tell hardware makers that Nvidia GPUs are supported.
Games I've played on my Arch Linux desktop with a 4090 in the past few months: Clair Obscur, Disco Elysium, Outer Worlds, Red Dead Redemption 2, Cyberpunk, Dispatch, Silent Hill f, FFVII Rebirth. I haven't had a single issue with any of these games. What games do you think will struggle? I can give them a shot if I own then and let you know how they do.
I have an nvidia card on catchyos with catchyos proton and I have not ran into a single game that does not run, well ok some only walk, but that's also a problem on AMD.
I am excluding games that rely on a kernelmode anticheat.
Not seeing any issues with my NVidia card.
I have been using Nvidia on Linux for years and am able to run 95%+ of my library on Steam.
That’s awesome! But not everyone’s library is the same, so YMMV. I regularly see problems with flight sims that are Nvidia-specific, for example.
I'd wager that 95% of Steam titles does run on Linux. Admittedly some big and popular games use invasive anti-cheat that's not supported, but they're less than 5%.
~30+ years
Having failed to get Wayland working on Debian Trixie with a 1050 Ti as an upgrade from X11, I've given up for now and will try again when I switch to AMD. This is a workstation not used for games so it'd be good to have Wayland working right but I'm not wasting time fighting it, and it'll get the GPU from the gaming rig when it becomes due nullifying the problem.
What I don't get is if these are proscribed steps (and they do read as such) why are they not automated with the module install? Why are we still fighting these issues if the 'workaround' is linear and well described? Is it as flimsy a reason as "write-an-article, collect-advertising-revenue" rather than contribute code to the installer?
The monthly wayland news, that we would be there already. Reminds me of fusion energy.
Hey Gemini Take this article and submit PRs to all major distros that applies all the fixes in each different situation. Thanks!
Is this stable on a multi-monitor mixed resolutions & refresh-rates setups?
Yeah haven't had issues with mine (3090)
3840x2160@59.99700
3840x1080@143.99899
...there is a nvidia bug on some cards where they idle high with multi monitors ~50W. Pretty sure that's OS independent though
Interesting coincidence, yesterday I was using a similar article to hopefully fix kwin starting to slow down after 10+ days of uptime.
I noticed this myself, both gnome and kde. It turned out to be that leaving Firefox open for long periods of time caused this.
I think for me jetbrains applications cause a memory leak in KWin which actually is becoming less of a problem now that I am switching to neovim slowly but surely.
Wow the ads are killing this page
But still no console, right?
To be clearer, as each wayland desktop pretty much creates their own incompatible wayland compositor (because wayland protocol is minimal and not feature complete) this is just a guide to fixing the hyperland broken wayland desktop. Not all waylands' broken desktops.
What protocol is missing from Wayland?
Yes Wayland doesn't have a printer protocol like Xorg, I know.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/t...
This is an incomplete list of protocols that aren't part of core Wayland. Compositors implement additional protocols that aren't even part of this process (e.g. wlr-screencopy-unstable). See the wlroota protocols here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/tree/master...
Right but there's the xdg-portal for screen capture which runs through Pipewire and supports sand-boxing (because its negotiated over dbus), which all the main compositors support.
Just because a protocol isn't part of Wayland, doesn't mean a standard protocol does not exists.
nvidia on linux [for desktop] is utterly broken. I ran nvidia cards for almost 15 years (shame on me): laggy X11 compositing, fragile and broken wayland. Broken suspend/resume. Too many moving parts (selected drivers, modprobe quirks, suspend/resume scripts). Moved to amd: slick x11, reliable wayland, NO MORE DRIVERS AT ALL, works like charm. And yes, I do playing in Linux.
Meanwhile Grandma says: "what's a wayland?"
How can anybody seriously argue Linux is an OS ready for ordinary users when you have to do crap like this? Complete delusion.
This isn't Linux, it's Arch running Hyprland. If Grandma wants that combination she knows what Wayland is.
If you want Linux that works, get a Chromebook. If you want to play games, use Bazzite.
Your grandma doesn't need to know what wayland is to use linux. This is an enthusiast forum for people interested in this exact topic.
This post shows that she does, if she is unfortunate enough to own a device with NVIDIA graphics, because without this fix Wayland will be broken.
Of course, this is only one example of probably hundreds where an average user would have no clue how to fix their broken computer.
It doesn't. And you shouldn't install Arch on your grandma's computer.
ChromeOS is a far better "Grandma" distribution than Windows or MacOS. Linux is simultaneously both the most Grandma friendly and least Grandma friendly, including every point in between.
You need to compare apples to apples, aka pre-installed vendor supported operating systems. If you're comparing installing an unsupported OS on unsupported hardware, Linux is far superior. Try installing MacOS on a Windows computer or Windows on a Mac if you're truly masochistic.
Are you saying windows and macos do not have any bugs? I have news for you.
Also wevare talking here about archlinux + hyperland compositor, not the typical Fedora, Mint or Ubunti/Zorin distro. Tinkerer's gonna tinker while the other users just use their computer regardless of the OS.
Linux isn't a single OS. It's hundreds of different and weird combinations.
There are Linux distributions that are better than Windows or iOS for grandma to use as well as distributions where you need to be an expert to do anything.
It doesn't matter, your options are either X11 or a Wayland-based compositor, both of them come with their respective headaches that a regular user has NO IDEA how to fix.
This is only accurate for people who choose enthusiast-centric DIY distributions such as Arch.
“Regular” users have plenty of distribution choices where there are zero of these types of headaches.
>both of them come with their respective headaches that a regular user has NO IDEA how to fix.
Unlike Windows, right? Right? Guys?
You're making this issue much bigger than it is in reality.
Dare I say that you frankly have NO IDEA what the experience on modern Linux is today.