Fedora 43 KDE Intermittent Black Screens - Wayland Crashing?

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I’ve been having issues with my new (as of today) fresh (drive wipe beforehand, no upgrade) Fedora 43 KDE install and black screens.
Every so often, the screen would go black like the monitor lost signal, and then reconnect 1-2 seconds later.
I noticed this happening one every 4-5 days in Fedora 42 so didn’t think to report it because it was so infrequent, but I’m now raising this because it’s happened more than ten times in less than five hours of usage.

I’m using the latest NVIDIA proprietary drivers available to me from RPM Fusion (580.95.05). This happens both when doing standard desktop tasks such as browsing the web, editing text documents, etc, and also whilst gaming. When gaming, however, the PC locks itself. I think that may be because the desktop crashes whilst I’m in full-screen mode.

Other things to note, that I’ve tried this with and without HDR and the same things happened, I installed the VK_hdr_layer package to get HDR to work in games, and that the monitor is connected via HDMI.

PC specs below.

I’ve also attached two files with the output of journalctl around the time of two crashes - one in-game and one doing normal desktop tasks. In both instances, it seems as if there’s something going on and 4 seconds later “The Wayland connection broke. Did the Wayland compositor die?”.

Nvidia drivers broken after recent update , doesn’t seem super relevant because it’s still OK most of the time.
KDE Plasma desktop crashes constantly after a system update - #16 by marko3209 , I’m using plasma-workspace-6.5.3-2.fc43.x86_64 and still have the issue, so unlikely to be this.

Has anyone else run into this problem? I’ve heard various things about NVIDIA drivers and black screens, but it seems strange to have been aggravated with 43.

OS: Fedora Linux 43 (KDE Plasma Desktop Edition) x86_64
Kernel: Linux 6.17.8-300.fc43.x86_64
Shell: bash 5.3.0
Display (MSI3DD2): 3840x2160 @ 240 Hz (as 2649x1490) in 32" [External, HDR]
DE: KDE Plasma 6.5.3
WM: KWin (Wayland)
WM Theme: Breeze
Theme: Breeze (Dark) [Qt], Breeze-Dark [GTK2], Breeze [GTK3]
Icons: breeze-dark [Qt], breeze-dark [GTK2/3/4]
Font: Noto Sans (10pt) [Qt], Noto Sans (10pt) [GTK2/3/4]
Cursor: breeze (24px)
Terminal: konsole 25.8.3
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D (16) @ 5.27 GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 [Discrete]
Memory: 4.64 GiB / 62.34 GiB (7%)
Swap: 0 B / 8.00 GiB (0%)
Disk (/): 457.74 GiB / 928.91 GiB (49%) - btrfs

journalctl (non-game)

Nov 29 16:27:03 fedora kscreenlocker_greet[11900]: QWaylandGLContext: Failed to create the decorations EGLContext. Decorations will not be drawn.
Nov 29 16:27:04 fedora kscreenlocker_greet[11900]: QWaylandGLContext: Failed to create the decorations EGLContext. Decorations will not be drawn.
Nov 29 16:27:04 fedora kscreenlocker_greet[11900]: QWaylandGLContext: Failed to create the decorations EGLContext. Decorations will not be drawn.
Nov 29 16:27:04 fedora kscreenlocker_greet[11900]: QWaylandGLContext: Failed to create the decorations EGLContext. Decorations will not be drawn.
Nov 29 16:27:04 fedora kscreenlocker_greet[11900]: The backend got an unknown wallpaper provider type. The wallpaper will now fall back to the default. Please check your wallpaper configuration!
Nov 29 16:27:04 fedora maliit-keyboard[11804]: QSGContext::initialize: depth buffer support missing, expect rendering errors
Nov 29 16:27:04 fedora maliit-keyboard[11804]: QSGContext::initialize: stencil buffer support missing, expect rendering errors
Nov 29 16:27:08 fedora kscreenlocker_greet[11900]: The Wayland connection broke. Did the Wayland compositor die?
Nov 29 16:27:13 fedora systemd[2561]: Started app-org.kde.konsole@55bb2e638f4045d4a3c57db04a99b045.service - Konsole - Terminal.
Nov 29 16:27:13 fedora systemd[2561]: Started app-org.kde.konsole-11953.scope.

journalctl (in-game)

Nov 29 20:10:41 fedora kscreenlocker_greet[12464]: QWaylandGLContext: Failed to create the decorations EGLContext. Decorations will not be drawn.
Nov 29 20:10:42 fedora kscreenlocker_greet[12464]: QWaylandGLContext: Failed to create the decorations EGLContext. Decorations will not be drawn.
Nov 29 20:10:42 fedora kscreenlocker_greet[12464]: The backend got an unknown wallpaper provider type. The wallpaper will now fall back to the default. Please c>
Nov 29 20:10:42 fedora kscreenlocker_greet[12464]: QWaylandGLContext: Failed to create the decorations EGLContext. Decorations will not be drawn.
Nov 29 20:10:42 fedora kscreenlocker_greet[12464]: QWaylandGLContext: Failed to create the decorations EGLContext. Decorations will not be drawn.
Nov 29 20:10:44 fedora kscreenlocker_greet[12464]: The Wayland connection broke. Did the Wayland compositor die?
Nov 29 20:10:52 fedora systemd[2514]: Started app-org.kde.konsole@d3aeacf05e4644b7b46265ae3a3205ae.service - Konsole - Terminal.
Nov 29 20:10:52 fedora systemd[2514]: Started app-org.kde.konsole-12534.scope.
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Had a few more crashes, and the only link between them seems to be these statements:

fedora kscreenlocker_greet[11900]: QWaylandGLContext: Failed to create the decorations EGLContext. Decorations will not be drawn.

fedora kscreenlocker_greet[11900]: The backend got an unknown wallpaper provider type. The wallpaper will now fall back to the default. Please check your wallpaper configuration!

fedora kscreenlocker_greet[11900]: The Wayland connection broke. Did the Wayland compositor die?

I’ll continue to look into this.

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I’ve just had an “official” crash of plasmashell (see output below, note that I’ve removed the long list of modules and details of the stack trace because they exceeded the character limit). Could be related? Unsure. Funnily enough, I just updated plasma-desktop from 6.5.3-1 to 6.5.3-2 so I’ll continue checking if that sorts it. That update only came through for me about an hour ago.

           PID: 2948 (plasmashell)
           UID: 1000 (main)
           GID: 1000 (main)
        Signal: 6 (ABRT)
     Timestamp: Sun 2025-11-30 12:04:16 GMT (49min ago)
  Command Line: /usr/bin/plasmashell --no-respawn
    Executable: /usr/bin/plasmashell
 Control Group: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/session.slice/plasma-plasmashell.service
          Unit: user@1000.service
     User Unit: plasma-plasmashell.service
         Slice: user-1000.slice
     Owner UID: 1000 (main)
       Boot ID: 2d045b69a5ad4448b49c487bf1932dc0
    Machine ID: 0c56440837b14ffabcdc11abc9db2052
      Hostname: fedora
       Storage: /var/lib/systemd/coredump/core.plasmashell.1000.2d045b69a5ad4448b49c487bf1932dc0.2948.1764504256000000.zst (present)
  Size on Disk: 43.9M
       Package: plasma-workspace/6.5.3-2.fc43
      build-id: 783b8e3f9f7e2f6ef26838edc971609754f616dd
       Message: Process 2948 (plasmashell) of user 1000 dumped core.
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OK I have diagnosed some of the symptoms. When gaming, the screen would reliably lock after approximately 5 minutes of gameplay with a bluetooth controller. Turns out it was exactly 5 minutes - the same as the timeout for the screen to lock. I verified this by changing the lock time to 1 or 2 minutes and it would reliably lock after the specified duration. This did not happen when playing with a keyboard and mouse, and I could reset the timer by clicking one button on the keyboard before continuing to play with the controller. Borderless windowed and fullscreen would both produce the same screen locking, as if the bluetooth inputs are not registered properly. I’ll need to investigate this.

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The timeout for sleep, suspend, & screen lock are based on activity. Activity is defined as input from keyboard or mouse. It would appear the bluetooth controller does not fit the definition of ‘activity’; just like a remote connection via network does not fit that definition.

You probably should change the timeout, possibly making it ‘never’, when gaming.

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Yep that seems to be the issue. Cheers Jeff. For future reference to other gamers, you can add kde-inhibit --power --screenSaver to the launch options (adding %command% to the end if launching through Steam) to prevent sleeping.

I’ll hold off marking this as solved until I see that the other sporadic black screens when on the desktop do not occur over the coming few days.

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Nearly two weeks later and none of the intermittent black screens have come back. I cannot confirm what the solution is, but it looks like updating plasma-desktop from 6.5.3-1 to 6.5.3-2 may have resolved that. I’ll mark this as solved.

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I can’t even access the bios after 43

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Just another note that it looks like Plasma 6.6.0 will stop the system sleeping when using a controller according to the latest This Week in Plasma blog post.

Using a game controller will now count as “activity”, stopping the system from automatically going to sleep or locking the screen. (Yelsin Sepulveda, KDE bug #328987)

@omoto1 it’s worth creating a new topic or finding a similar one as it sounds significantly wider in scope than only display-related bugs. I hope you manage to find a solution.