Plasma/Wayland/Nvidia

Here's how to run with the proprietary Nvidia driver on Wayland:

Prerequisites

To use the Plasma Wayland session:

• Use an up-to-date version of Plasma (explicit sync support was implemented in 6.1)
• Ensure a reasonably new NVIDIA driver:
  • minimum supported by KWin is 495.44;
  • XWayland apps are usable with 555 and newer.
• You need to have the Nvidia EGL library installed. It can be a separate package (libnvidia-egl-wayland1) or bundled with the driver package (e.g. nvidia-gl-G06 on openSUSE since 555).
• To run XWayland apps without flickering, at least XWayland 24.1 is required.

Use the modesetting driver

Check whether the driver is running in modesetting mode:

cat /sys/module/nvidia_drm/parameters/modeset

It should print “Y”. If not, modify your kernel command line and add the line nvidia_drm.modeset=1. Search for “kernel parameters” in your distribution; https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Kernel_parameters is a good starting point.

It is also possible to pass the parameter via module configuration:

echo options nvidia_drm modeset=1 | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia_drm.conf

You need to regenerate the initramfs in case your distribution provides the graphics drivers in initramfs (e.g. sudo update-initramfs -u)

Login

• Select “Plasma (Wayland)” from your login manager
• Enjoy your beautiful super-fast accelerated Wayland desktop!

Known Limitations

• Night Color is not applied to the mouse cursor: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=479889
• Poor performance on external screens on hybrid GPU setups when using NVIDIA GPU as a secondary GPU because it requires CPU copying from the primary GPU to the secondary GPU (see https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/1031, https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=452219)