You are welcome to review the thread where I got help getting my GeForce GTX 960 card and driver installed on my old desktop where I’m attempting to run F43 Sway here: Fedora 43 Sway and Geforce GTX 960
Now, I have the issue of SDDM displaying a blank screen, and I’m hoping I can get this to work.
My monitor is plugged into the Geforce GTX 960.
inxi -Gxx reports that the graphics card is using the “Nvidia” driver.
Grub boot screen appears, Plymouth screen appears, and when the SDDM greeter screen should appear, I get a black screen with a blinking curser in the far top left corner of the screen.
I can switch to a console using “Ctrl+Alt+F2…F6”, log in and look at logs and other CLI output with no issues.
The systemd service for SDDM shows that it is running and everything is fine.
I just can’t get SDDM log in to appear, and get to a GUI desktop. Any ideas of places I can look for what might be going wrong?
Could this still be an issue with the nvidia graphics card?
I found this post in the forum Fedora 43 KDE sometimes boots to a black screen which seems to describe the same issue that I was having. So I tried the temporary fix following these steps:
Edit the grub command and deleting rhgb and then booting.
Switch to console #2 using “Ctrl+Alt+F2”.
Logging in with my user and password.
Then I tried typing sway and enter.
I then got the following errors.
[sway/server.c:163]!!! Proprietary Nvidia drivers are in use !!!
[sway/server.c:165]Use Nouveau instead
[sway/server.c:175]Proprietary drivers are NOT supported. To launch sway anyway. launch with --unsupported-gpu and DO NOT report issues.
Are those error messages the reason why SDDM boots into a black screen with a blinking cursor?
In my other post no one said that the proprietary driver is not supported. The reason I’m using it instead of Nouveau is because I couldn’t even get the live environment and installer to start up using the Nouveau driver. I had to install using the iGPU, then install the Nvidia driver, then switch the BIOS to use the Nvidia GPU.
Am I missing something?
If I use sway –unsupported-gpu sway does start and I get a GUI desktop.
SDDM is what the F43 Sway iso came with installed. I haven’t tried using a different login-manager. I would think that the Fedora Sway project wouldn’t use SDDM as their login-manager if it didn’t work properly. I can certainly try a different login-manager.
I’m doubtful that I can use the nouveau drivers through, because that driver crashed during the booting of the live image, and I couldn’t install Fedora Sway using the nouveau drivers and the Nvidia GTX 960 card as my graphics output.
Manually start sway from a tty and it will tell you what to do to get sway to run with proprietary Nvidia drivers. sway by default will not start with proprietary Nvidia drivers. You have to, in this case, launch sway with a startup flag that I can’t remember atm.
Honestly, I was hopping to avoid these extra steps of booting into text mode only, switching to a tty, and manually starting sway. Perhaps it is not worth the effort to run the Nvidia GPU, because Fedora Sway will run just fine off of the iGPU.
I had the hardware laying around unused, and I thought it would be nice for some apps to have the added muscle of a dedicated GPU, and I could keep some old hardware being useful for a bit longer too.
I enjoy F43 Sway, and have it on a laptop that I use regularly, so I thought it would be nice to have on my secondary machine at the office since I’m enjoying it on my home laptop.
Normally, I skip installing proprietary drivers if everything runs out of the box. If you’re not going to be doing anything highly demanding that requires proprietary drivers then stick to the easy path keeping it simple for yourself.
Keeping older hardware in service that is a normal common-sense approach as far as I’m concerned. Keeping it simple and as vanilla as possible with the re-integration of the other hardware is an excellent strategy. Having something to fallback to in emergency situations or complimenting your workflow is flat out logical rather than toss stuff into a corner which is wasteful.
Good stuff. Totally agree with your approach concerning your laptop.
Alternatively, you could try other distros on your laptop. Two different devices with two different distros is how I usually run. I would probably still check a different distro with sway and Nvidia GPU drivers on that laptop just to be sure everything is as it should be (if you haven’t already done so).
I did try Omarchy with the Nvidia video card installed, but that resulted in a computer that failed to boot. I think the BIOS took the system drive out of the priority list for booting. At least that is my conclusion after yanking the GPU card, and trying to boot into F43 Sway drive again which also didn’t work. I’m trying a reinstall of F43 Sway right now without the GPU card installed and just running off of the iGPU on this old desktop. I would like to get a working system back over at the office. I’ve been missing my secondary machine . I will see if this reinstall works.
I’ve done this before too. I was running F43 on my home desktop (F43 Workstation) and on my homelab servers. I was running MX Linux on this secondary office desktop which was fine, but I wanted to spend more time in Sway since I appreciate keeping the hands on the keyboard as much as possible.
