I just bought a new HP Envy 34 all-in-one. I have a second HP monitor plugged into the computer’s HDMI port. There are two display adapters installed - an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU and an Intel(R) UHD Graphics 750. The machine has two SSDs - one with Windows 11 and one with open space for Fedora. I installed Fedora 37 on the second SSD, and the installation appeared to run fine except that the system didn’t detect the second monitor.
When I restarted the machine, the second monitor displayed the Fedora splash screen, but the main monitor was flashing and displayed four copies of “ghostly” versions of the splash screen. The system did not respond to any keyboard or mouse inputs, and I ended up powering it off. When I powered it back up, grub loader window was displayed, but it was pulsating and ghostly. I was unable to select anything in the grub loader with the keyboard.
I powered the machine off, and brought it up into the BIOS and loaded Windows 11. The display was still pulsating, but I was able to control the system with mouse and keyboard. I was absolutely freaked out that I might have destroyed my NVIDIA adapter. I went into the Windows command line and used diskpart to remove all the Fedora partitions. Upon reboot, the display was still pulsating, but started to settle down. Over the next few minutes, both displays returned to normal under Windows and I breathed a sigh of relief.
But this scared me bad. I want to use this system to learn Linux and eventually migrate off Windows entirely, but right now I’m too freaked to continue.
You should be aware that the default nouveau drivers provided by fedora do not seem to support any nvidia GPU in the 3000 series and above, so using the integrated gpu is an excellent idea until the user installs the nvidia drivers from rpmfusion. The firmware for the later nvidia gpus is also not in the linux-firmware package that is installed from the ISO used to install (unless one uses the netinstall/everything version to do the install). A full system upgrade immediately after the install is always recommended and seems almost mandatory for those with the later hardware such as GPUs and wifi devices that were recently released.
Thanks for the quick response folks. Since I bought the machine specifically to do video editing, disabling the nvidia adapter isn’t really an optimal solution. I understand the workarounds suggested, but I think I will give Fedora a pass for right now. I’m just happy the issue is known and not a fault in my new hardware. I bought the machine as a factory-refurbished return, so not being aware of what the issue had been that caused the original buyer to return it, I was worried I might have bought a lemon. The warranty expires in a couple of months. Maybe I’ll try the Fedora workarounds then. The fact that the problem persisted even after I had reverted to Windows really frightened me. Thanks again.