Fedora 40/gnome46 Nvidia Wayland problems (Might have been too many displays)

Hello. First post…

TLDR: If you have 3 monitors, and 1 Samsung TV hooked up to your NVidia 3070 (even if the TV is turned off), unplug the TV connection.

I’ve committed to leave Windows behind and have started, in earnest, with Fedora. (I’m hoping it will go better than my commitment to OS/2 Warp last time I tried to swap away :wink: ).

Also, this is not a technical discussion - purely speculation of causation vs correlation…

I started my journey with 6.8.5. After a week or so, decided to make the switch. Took the opportunity to add another 32GB and 2TB SSD (separate from my Windows SSD). About that time, 6.10.6 came out. Seemingly, ever since that time (weeks ago), I have had nothing but display problems (black screens, desktop wallpaper and no icons, etc). It’s been maddening.

6.8.5 would boot and all my screens would work, but had a message about the Nvidia display drivers were not loading.

6.10.6, 6.10.7 would boot to a black screen, I’d type my password on the black screen, the background wallpaper would load but with no icons. I could not get it working… (The Nvidia 555 drivers were loaded, but X11 was the display server…).

On a whim – today, I went down to 1 monitor. 6.10.7 booted flawlessly. Rebooted multiple times – flawless. Complete shutdown and restart – flawless. Went to 2 monitors. Flawless. Reboots and cold boots – Flawless. 3 monitors – Flawless. Plug in the HDMI running to my Samsung TV (which is turned off); Bam – black screen. Reboots and powering down\up. Issues every time. Unplug the TV – back to flawless.

Of note – when the TV was plugged in, the screen was black – as mentioned – and the machine was running X11 on the 555 Nvidia driver (with 6.10.x). When the TV (again, always off) was unplugged, Nvidia 555 came up with Wayland perfectly (with 6.10.x).

Root cause (well, as root as I can get…): When I put in my new SSD and 32Gb RAM, I plugged in my TV’s HDMI cable….

So – not sure if this will ever help anyone, but…. It might.