Might be relqted on this i had multiple days on gnome and it stopped after remiving propriatery drivers was more stable and still crashed but multiple hours in use. Now i am on cosmic no issues so far
This is my second install of Fedora 44. The first one i tried installing the Nvidia drivers for it, but it completely messed up the system, so - as it was a new clean install - i just pulled the plug and installed a fresh one - and i thought i dodged a bullet this time, as every thing was running smooth
So, the problem is, that this is older hardware which is put to use as a Jellyfin server, so the GPU is also a bit older. It’s a GTX650. My i5-7500 has a GPU, so if i can’t resolve it, i can switch to that.
So where is there a real guide for such an old GPU?
It was easy on my main rig, which runs an RTX3060 12GB, it just installed and worked
You need to install the legacy 470xx version of the Nvidia drivers - the latest version won’t work with that age of GPU.
See the RPM Fusion Nvidia guide, making sure to follow the section for Geforce 600/700, and not the one for “Current GeForce/Quadro/Tesla”.
However, those drivers don’t properly support Wayland so they may not work well in GNOME. You could consider trying for example the Xfce spin which still supports X11.
Nouveau does in principle support Wayland for these cards, but unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be working out in practice, based on your logs
If you are using wayland the nvidia 470xx driver is not appropriate. As already noted that driver does not work well with wayland, but it does work well with X11.
I see 3 choices.
use the nouveau driver (with all its failings) so you can continue to use wayland
Switch the installed OS to one that supports X11 so you can install and use the 470xx driver
install a replacement GPU that works with the newer drivers (anything equal to or newer than the 1650 is supported by the current nvidia 610 driver.)
Nvidia dropped support for the maxwell and pascal chipsets (the 800 thru 10xx cards) in October 2025 and those are still supported with wayland as well if you were to install the 580xx drivers, but those cards are all 10 years old or older.
Thank you Jeff - i found out that the not so nice way, completely locked out - had to edit GRUB at boot to get in and then trying to get rid of whatever i could, that had anything to do with Nvidia drivers.
I did actually want to use XFCE because it’s lighter on the HW, as it’s not the mightiest of computers, but it didn’t work for some reason and i ended up with the standard Fedora Workstation.
This PC’s only use is being a streamer, so i’m not investing in a GPU for it. As i wrote initially i think, my i5-7500 has a GPU, and since i’m not using transcoding on Jellyfin, then i don’t need a GPU to do much - maybe it’s even so old and crappy that GTX650, that it’s slower than the iGPU.
So how is the right way and most sure to add the XFCE desktop?
The cleanest way and most reliable would be to reinstall from the installation iso.
The most recent iso with up to date software would be to use the respin found here
It is also possible to add the desktop to an existing installation but it would be necessary to also add a lot of other packages to an existing install in order to have the full support for x11 and the appropriate environment.
Yes, and for some reason it did not go well installing that, so i just made the “ordinary” Workstation Live USB and installed that.
I think for now, i’ll just keep an eye on what happens in regards to the Nvidia drivers. Mostly this machine just sits and run Jellyfin, it’s not used for much else.
Windows has always been a jerk when it comes to the use of memory, and therefor there exist a lot of utils to clear and release it again; Is there something like it here on Linux?
Well, i would like to avoid that, as i like to have a graphical interface. I have an iGPU in my i5-7500 and am not doing any transcoding, as i only stream to my TV and haven’t had any problems. I could therefor switch to that if the Nvidia situation becomes too annoying.
So looking through the link and sub-links, it’s 8.7 GB i cache - up a GB just messing with it for 20 min - which should be releasable, as i read the comments, or?
depends on what the system is doing. try cat <large file> >/dev/null
available not committed memory is used by the kernel to buffer recently read disk blocks, so it can access the same blocks from the buffer instead of fetching them again from storage.
you can force the system to drop those buffers
Deleting a file from storage does that as well, because the cached disk blocks are not needed any more, they were freed on storage.
this has nothing to do with any freezes. Windows does the same thing, check your task manager, in that picture 5.2GB are free/available but 4.7GB are used as cache for disk blocks.
