I have a somewhat older Dell laptop with an nVidia NVS3100M graphics chip. I was able to get that combo to work nicely with F40, Wayland, and the nouveau driver (I can’t use the RPM fusion drivers as the chipset needs the 340 series drivers and no newer drivers supports this GPU). This combination needed to force GTK4 to use the “gl” renderer instead of the default “ngl”, but otherwise everything worked fine.
Until F41.
After upgrading to F41, the login screen from GDM fails to display. Lots of “garbage” on the screen. I can ssh into the laptop, but the laptop’s display is essentiallly non-functional. I can also alter the kernel arguments to boot to the multi-user target (instead of the graphical target) and use the good old text console.
Switching gdm to use xorg allows everything to work as expected.
Any thoughts (or is anyone else seeing this)? Note that this is not the same issue as others are reporting here as I’m not (and can’t) use the RPM Fusion nVidia drivers – only nouveau. Would this even be worth trying to open a bug report on this?
I get the feeling that I may be destined to continue to run X until Fedora stops including it. (Or am I being so quietly encouraged to get a newer laptop).
Maybe you could try installing that driver from rpmfusion-nonfree and see if it helps. Configuration - RPM Fusion to configure the rpmfusion-nonfree repo then install with dnf install akmod-nvidia-390xx
Not sure that’s going to work but can give it a try and see what happens. I have a NVS 3100M (GT218M) GPU, not the newer NVS 310 GPU. The release notes for the 390 series drivers don’t list the NVS 3100M as supported. .
On most of the nvidia gpus the display shown with those 2 commands shows the architecture for the card first then the model number within the [] brackets.
Looking up the 200 series cards calls for the 340xx driver while looking up the NVS 310 card calls for the 390xx driver. You may try both those versions to see which (if either) may work.
My two different systems show this with lspci | grep VGA
Verified through lspci that the card model (between the brackets) is NVS 3100M.
The 390 driver found in RPM fusion builds on F41, but during boot it throws errors that the NVS 3100M isn’t supported by the driver. It reverts back to nouveau. Which matches what I found from nVidia’s documentation.
The 340 driver versions do not appear to be avaiable any more in RPM fusion for F41.
With Fedora 41 updating Xorg server to latest version 21.1, the older Nvidia legacy driver 340xx is no more compatible with the default Xorg server. So it has been removed from the f41-nonfree and later RPM Fusion repository. Please remember that others Nvidia legacy drivers remain available on a voluntary maintainer basis.
Guess that explains why the 340 driver isn’t available for F41.
That part is clear. All nvidia drivers version 470 and older do not support wayland.
It certainly may be of benefit to consider newer hardware since the software is always evolving with the hardware and few are using devices of any kind that are more than 8 to 10 years old.
There is oversupply of good used robust “enterprise” grade laptops that won’t run Windows 11. Major vendors have “refurbished” models, and there are reputable vendors who buy in bulk from large enterprises that are downsizing or upgrading. A newer system with an NVME SSD will be faster and use less power than any 8-10 years old laptop. Many users prefer integrated graphics – iGPU performance has improved while newer dGPUs are even more powerful but drain batteries.
