Issues with some applications after installing Nvidia drivers

[wultyc (Jorge Azevedo)]

Hello everyone. I believe this might be repetitive for some of you, but I’m feeling hopeless trying to find a solution either here or on some other websites.

I have a Nvidia RTX 3060 and my current problem is:

• With the default drivers, I cannot use the speakers connected to my display ( I have two displays, one of them (connected via HDMI) with embedded speakers and another (connected via DisplayPort) one with external ones that I want to use, but that for some reason it shows up on the UI but no sound gets out of it

• After installing the Nvidia drivers (more details below), the sound on my DisplayPort monitor starts working, but apps like MS Edge or Chrome start stuttering and blinking making them useless. Also, the mouse gets slower when scrolling.

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For starters, I’m running Fedora 40 with KDE Plasma. I used some other distros in the past (mostly Debian-based), but for some reason or another, I had to stop using Linux on the desktop around 2018 and I missed a lot of the last updates on Nvidia and Linux. Also, this is the first time I have a PC with a discrete GPU that I’m trying to install Linux on.

I followed this guide on RPMFusion Howto/NVIDIA - RPM Fusion to install the drivers. Also, I made sure to have followed the guide Howto/Secure Boot - RPM Fusion regarding secure boot.

After the reboot, immediately I felt the desktop sluggish, and MS Edge (installed via Flatpak) started blinking and getting unusable. I had no issue with Firefox so I tried installing Chrome via RPM to check if the problem was related to Flatpak but no luck, Chrome was blinking as well.

I confirmed the driver was loaded by running the modinfo command

$ modinfo -F version nvidia
550.XX # I can't remember what was the patch version, but I'm sure it was 550 dot something

I found this post here, but I was not able to extract from here anything useful for my problem. Fedora 39 and 40: Nvidia drivers stuttering

In the end, I returned to Howto/NVIDIA - RPM Fusion, this time to the uninstall drivers section. After running the command, I rebooted the machine and everything got back to its original state (the browsers working correctly and no audio on my DisplayPort monitor).

I confirmed the driver was not loaded by running the modinfo command

$ modinfo -F version nvidia
modinfo: ERROR: Module nvidia not found.

I want to keep using Fedora and Plasma 6 (I’m loving the combo) but the missing audio on my display is making it very inconvenient for me.

I hope some of you can help here, and please be kind. I did the best research I was able to with the knowledge I had about the topic.

[computersavvy (Jeff V)]

The nouveau driver will not support the 3060 GPU and allow sound.
The nvidia driver does. The current version is 550.76.

However, since you are using kde&plasma the default DE is wayland (As I understand it the xorg packages are not installed). There are some issues with various apps on wayland with nvidia.

Did you happen to install the xorg DE and try that. There are some very specific apps that I also have problems with when trying to use wayland so I have chosen to continue using X11. Steam is one of those, as is Chrome (occasionally).

[wultyc (Jorge Azevedo)]

Indeed I thought the problem might be related to Wayland, so I decided to test with x11, but it did not help that much. I installed plasma-workspace-x11 and kwin-x11 packages based on an article I found in some forum

sudo dnf install plasma-workspace-x11 kwin-x11

Although, Wayland would be a good thing to have. My displays have different DPIs and therefore I need a different scale between them.

But tbh, what I cannot understand is why I have sound on one display and not on another one. Here is a screenshot of my sound manager. The HDMI 1 is the display connected over HDMI and the sound works. The HDMI2 is my DisplayPort monitor with external speakers. Is this an issue with the DisplayPort part?