A system-upgrade from F43 to F44 resulted in the dreaded black screen. None of the three previous F43 GRUB entries would boot either, all resulting in the same black screen. Tried nomodeset, didn’t work either. I was able to boot into Rescue mode (F43 kernel) but the graphics were sluggish, mouse and keyboard lagged several seconds. Tried deleting nvidia driver, no better. Reinstalled nvidia driver, would not compile the kernel - F44 running but tried to compile to a F43.
Tried to install from an .iso, failed to load installer (whatever the new browser - slither or something - failed each time). Tried a F43 .iso, same issue. Eventually reinstalled from internet - which worked.
Now the system is extremely sluggish, long delays in loading and working within applications (particularly evolution email) and switching between windows etc. PC shows very heavy HDD activity almost constantly.
Switched out Wayland (which has been a problem in the past with graphics issues) for x11, no improvement. None of the interweb resources have been of the slightest use in sorting this.
Graphics card is NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050; processor 6 × Intel® Core™ i5-8400 CPU @ 2.80GHz.
[EDIT2] Applied the above ‘fix’ - only slight improvement in graphics display. System is still very sluggish with lots of HDD activity any time an application is activated, often also during use of an application (eg Firefox, evolution displaying new pages/emails).
It suggests to me that it may be a kernel issue of some kind?
However I am not savvy enough to delve into the whys. Any advice appreciated.
The graphics driver issue is unfortunately expected with the F43 to F44 upgrade, for that generation of GPU. The black screen was not expected though - in theory it should fall back to nouveau which should work… just slowly. Were you using X11 and not Wayland back on F43?
On your new install, it sounds like you have 2 different issues:
Slow graphics? Check if your NVIDIA driver is installed by running the nvidia-smi command. (I would also suggest switching back to Wayland, as it is better supported these days.)
Heavy HDD activity? Try finding what process is responsible for the heavy disk activity with a tool like iotop or application like Mission Center.
The results will provide a lot of info we will need to assist.
You also might try several different commands in a terminal and provide the outputs so we might see additional specific details. dnf list --installed kernel\* df -h ls /boot
Please post the output from each command as preformatted text, which is done by copying the text from your terminal and pasting it here, then highlight that text and click the </> button on the text entry window toolbar.
I have reverted bank to a legacy nvidia driver as per link; so far it is working, somewhat sluggish but not as bad as before.
I have also reverted to the Wayland Plasma version and will see how that goes.
Oddly, the system is not as sluggish/HDD intensive as it was subsequent to the last couple of daily upgrades - no idea why that may be (although it is still slow at times and occasionally lock up still).
I am going to monitor it for a few more days before I proceeds with your suggestions.
