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.
Kinda now. That's what I've been doing for a while now.
I have a PC though, not a laptop. Running CachyOS with 4070Ti, GNOME with Wayland. Even VR works
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 had Nvidia up until a year ago or so. Every single time I had to do any kind of maintenance it was because of their drivers.
Since I don't play any more games than Minecraft and don't really need a fancy gpu I have switched to intel. Now I have two things which I buy intel only. GPUs and WiFi. I have had one glitch with opengl under a VM, but I am not sure that is intel only since it also had issues with my Nvidia card.
Almost true. Some versions of the drivers, yes. Other versions, no. I didn't notice this until a few months ago but every now and then I'd have things like external monitors not working or one of them not waking from sleep on its own. So after like a week of banging my head against the wall on what configuration file I must've changed to break something, I found massive amounts of posts saying "I updated the driver and the following is now broken" so as a desperate attempt I backdated. Fixed everything. Immediately told apt to never update that driver ever again. There are still issues sometimes (like if the computer has been up for a few weeks the driver fails to allocate memory on display plug in), but in general it's usable.
I recommend everyone not update those drivers unless they're not working, and don't be afraid to downgrade. Almost every version has people saying on their system something doesn't work.
What? The main difference between distros is the package manager. I don't see anything here that's distro specific other than editing the pacman config to enable multilib, which to be fair is default on with many distros.
But Systemd? That's on most distros these days. I'm pretty sure it is on all of those in the top 10.
Also, the OP is using CachyOS. You can tell b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶o̶p̶e̶n̶ ̶f̶i̶l̶e̶s̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶n̶a̶n̶o̶ from the neofetch logo. But, I'll mention that if you checkout distrowatch, Arch based distros are incredibly common. Over the past 12 months the most downloaded distros are CachyOS (Arch), Mint (Deb/Ubuntu), MX (Deb), Debian, Endeavour (Arch), Pop (Ubuntu), Manjaro (Arch), Ubuntu, Fedora, Zorin (Deb/Ubuntu).
That said, you don't have to do any of this for either Endeavour (which I use) nor Manjaro (my old distro of choice). Along with Pop, one of the main motivations for these distros is Nvidia support. Really I don't expect most people to even be facing those problems these days. On Endeavour I've only run into one Nvidia problem over the last 5 years and it was when a beta driver conflicted with the most recent kernel. Super easy fix once I realized the problem.
On a side note/friendly reminder:
anyone that's using linux these days with an Nvidia card I suggest making sure your /efi partition is >1GB (at least 2GB but give it some headroom. Disk is still cheap). If you're putting the drivers in the kernel (you should), like done here, those are going to take up a lot of space. (If you get a space error, run `sudo du -ch --max-depth=3 /efi | sort -hr` to see the problem. You can, usually, safely delete any of the `initrd-fallback` versions and rerun `sudo reinstall-kernels`. They'll be built again but this will usually give you the headroom you need)
Hm, I've recently noticed kwin taking up what seems like way too much CPU at idle. Fedora with KDE. Happens on both X11 and Wayland with Wayland being worse and perceptibly slower.
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.
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 have 3 intel gpus. One for light gaming and desktop use (3 screens), another one for light gaming and one for video transcoding. The experience is flawless for me. One of the cards seems to have issues with qemu and opengl rendering, but it is an older model and is no longer sold retail.
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.
I still get fairly regular graphical glitches on Bazzite (Wayland) with a 3060ti. Certainly better than it used to be, but doesn’t quite feel there yet.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 54.0 ms ] threadHow can anybody seriously argue Linux is an OS ready for ordinary users when you have to do crap like this? Complete delusion.
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.
Since I don't play any more games than Minecraft and don't really need a fancy gpu I have switched to intel. Now I have two things which I buy intel only. GPUs and WiFi. I have had one glitch with opengl under a VM, but I am not sure that is intel only since it also had issues with my Nvidia card.
I recommend everyone not update those drivers unless they're not working, and don't be afraid to downgrade. Almost every version has people saying on their system something doesn't work.
But Systemd? That's on most distros these days. I'm pretty sure it is on all of those in the top 10.
Also, the OP is using CachyOS. You can tell b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶o̶p̶e̶n̶ ̶f̶i̶l̶e̶s̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶n̶a̶n̶o̶ from the neofetch logo. But, I'll mention that if you checkout distrowatch, Arch based distros are incredibly common. Over the past 12 months the most downloaded distros are CachyOS (Arch), Mint (Deb/Ubuntu), MX (Deb), Debian, Endeavour (Arch), Pop (Ubuntu), Manjaro (Arch), Ubuntu, Fedora, Zorin (Deb/Ubuntu).
That said, you don't have to do any of this for either Endeavour (which I use) nor Manjaro (my old distro of choice). Along with Pop, one of the main motivations for these distros is Nvidia support. Really I don't expect most people to even be facing those problems these days. On Endeavour I've only run into one Nvidia problem over the last 5 years and it was when a beta driver conflicted with the most recent kernel. Super easy fix once I realized the problem.
On a side note/friendly reminder:
anyone that's using linux these days with an Nvidia card I suggest making sure your /efi partition is >1GB (at least 2GB but give it some headroom. Disk is still cheap). If you're putting the drivers in the kernel (you should), like done here, those are going to take up a lot of space. (If you get a space error, run `sudo du -ch --max-depth=3 /efi | sort -hr` to see the problem. You can, usually, safely delete any of the `initrd-fallback` versions and rerun `sudo reinstall-kernels`. They'll be built again but this will usually give you the headroom you need)
No more drivers is just..false?
The rest was true up to roughly 3 years ago. Now I'm a happy camper
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?