F43 Gnome: How to use old Nvidia GPU that doesn't support Wayland?

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I have an old system that has an old Nvidia GPU (before I knew better) that doesn’t support Wayland and it is currently running F43 Workstation with Gnome DE using X11. I wanted to discuss what options I have to upgrade to F43. I don’t use this system much so it’s not worth it to upgrade the GPU, but I’d like to keep using it if possible and save it from eWaste. I’m using the rpmfusion drivers as Nouveau gave me display issues.

Since Gnome is removing X11 support, I can’t continue to use this GPU and Gnome if I understand it correctly.

I suspect my best option is to switch to a different DE that will be most likely to continue X11 support such as Cinnamon, XFCE, Mate or KDE Plasma. Any recommendation on which would continue X11 support the longest? It seems to me that KDE Plasma would be the most likely to remove X11 support, so that’s probably not the way to go.

Another option would be to remove the DE entirely and just use the terminal, but that’s less attractive but possible for me.

I suspect a lot of us are going to be having to deal with this, so I wanted to discuss if there are any other options and what the best option might be.

Thanks.

NVIDIA GeForce GT 610 driver issue on Fedora 43 (previously worked on Fedora 42)
Problem installing Nvidia driver on Fedora 43 workstation
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What gpu is actually in use? We have no information other than it is ‘old’.

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Cinnamon still gets a lot of love.

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Below is the GPU this old system has. According to RPMFusion, this 470 driver is the one you have to use and Nvidia didn’t get Wayland working until around the 550 or higher versions. A few years ago when I was first trying to get this working, I tired nouveau and it worked worse than the RPMFusion Nvidia driver, but I haven’t gone back to see if recent versions of nouveau work any better.

I’m thinking switching this system to Cinnamon and sticking with X11 may be my path of least resistance.

Graphics:
  Device-1: NVIDIA GK104 [GeForce GTX 680] vendor: eVga.com. driver: nvidia
    v: 470.256.02 arch: Kepler-2 pcie: speed: 2.5 GT/s lanes: 16 ports:
    active: none off: DVI-D-1 empty: DP-1,DVI-I-1,HDMI-A-1 bus-ID: 01:00.0
    chip-ID: 10de:1180
  
Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 21.1.18 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.8
    compositor: gnome-shell driver: X: loaded: nouveau unloaded: modesetting
    failed: nvidia alternate: fbdev,nv,vesa gpu: nvidia,nvidia-nvswitch
    display-ID: :0 screens: 1
  
Screen-1: 0 s-res: 1920x1080 s-dpi: 96
  
Monitor-1: DVI-D-0 res: 1920x1080 hz: 60 dpi: 96 diag: 585mm (23.04")
  
API: OpenGL v: 4.6.0 vendor: nvidia v: 470.256.02 glx-v: 1.4
    direct-render: yes renderer: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680/PCIe/SSE2
  
API: EGL Message: EGL data requires eglinfo. Check --recommends.
  
Info: Tools: api: glxinfo gpu: nvidia-settings x11: xdriinfo, xdpyinfo,
    xprop, xrandr
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Wayland first was integrated with the nvidia driver with the release following the 470 driver.

That means you have a choice. Either continue using X11 with that GPU and the 470 driver, or get a newer GPU. As I understand it f43 will no longer support X11, so your choices are limited.

I also understand that the nouveau driver does reasonably well with the older nvidia GPUs and wayland. Have you tried using it instead of the nvidia driver?

It seems that even most of the 1000 series GPUs will no longer be supported with the release of the 585 driver which is coming up soon.

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I went ahead and just switched this system to Cinnamon and it seems to be working well.

I had previously tried nouveau and it didn’t work with Wayland but that was a year or two ago. When X11 is completely dropped from Fedora I’ll re-visit that and see if it works better then.

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I have an old iMac with only Nvidia and have been using nouveau most of time since Fedora 38. It is not hard to switch back and forth when Nvidia is needed, but does need a reboot. Nouveau is adequate for my mostly text-based use cases: email, online forums, development, etc.

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I would give nouveau another try, I heard it really improved!