NVIDIA drivers not working

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1

Recently installed linux and I’ve been having frequent graphics related issues. Mostly games being far laggier then they were on windows. Pretty sure the issue is my NVIDIA drivers not working, causing my laptop to use my integrated GPU instead. I’ve tried reinstalling the drivers through the control panel but I’m not entirely sure I did that correctly tbh. I’ve found people talking about some methods that seem like they would work in other places but I’m not sure how to implement any of them because I have absolutely no idea how to actually go about doing pretty much anything yet and I have no idea where to even start. Every time my laptop starts up it says something like “loading [whatever the normal drivers are called] failed, falling back on neveau”. Also trying to boot up my computer without my second monitor connected will sometimes cause it to not work.

My GPU is an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU

2

That should be nouveau, the open-source driver that Fedora is allowed to provide. Gamers generally use the Nvidia drivers from rpmfusion. The falling back message indicates a problem with the Nvidia driver.

Note that when reporting problems it is best if you can ensure that Fedora and vendor firmware packages are fully updated so you aren’t chasing a solved problem.

3

I have the exact same GPU. Could you share the output of lspci | grep -i vga and see if by any chance you have NVIDIA Corporation AD107M [GeForce RTX 4060 Max-Q / Mobile] (rev a1) or something similar?

4

This would seem to possibly mean secure boot is enabled but the module is not signed or the key was not imported into the bios as is required.

First lets check if the drivers are properly installed.
dnf list --installed \*nvidia\* should show those drivers as being installed from the rpmfusion repo. If not installed from rpmfusion then other steps will need to be performed. The steps below rely on the drivers from rpmfusion.

mokutil --sb-state should show whether secure boot is enabled or disabled. If enabled then you probably need to follow these steps.

  1. sudo akmods --rebuild --force to ensure the driver is properly compiled and installed
  2. follow the steps in the file /usr/share/doc/akmods/README.secureboot to import the signing key into bios. The reboot at that time should then allow the nvidia driver to load into the kernel.

If this does not work for you then let us know so we can do more troubleshooting.

5

It is fully updated as far as I’m aware.

6

Just ran it and this is exactly what I have.

7

Cool, if it’s of any help, my NVIDIA drivers are working. My Secure Boot is disabled and I’m using Fedora 43 Silverblue:

$ mokutil --sb-state
SecureBoot disabled

$ lsmod | grep nvidia
nvidia_uvm           4079616  4
nvidia_drm            159744  10
nvidia_modeset       2265088  4 nvidia_drm
nvidia_wmi_ec_backlight    12288  0
nvidia              15896576  71 nvidia_uvm,nvidia_modeset
drm_ttm_helper         16384  2 amdgpu,nvidia_drm
video                  81920  4 nvidia_wmi_ec_backlight,amdgpu,ideapad_laptop,nvidia_modeset
wmi                    32768  10 lenovo_wmi_events,video,nvidia_wmi_ec_backlight,lenovo_wmi_hotkey_utilities,lenovo_wmi_other,wmi_bmof,lenovo_wmi_capdata01,lenovo_wmi_gamezone,ideapad_laptop,lenovo_wmi_helpers

$ switcherooctl list
Device: 0
  Name:        Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] HawkPoint1
  Default:     yes
  Discrete:    no
  Environment: DRI_PRIME=pci-0000_06_00_0 VK_LOADER_DRIVERS_SELECT=*radeon*

Device: 1
  Name:        NVIDIA Corporation AD107M [GeForce RTX™ 4060 Max-Q / Mobile]
  Default:     no
  Discrete:    yes
  Environment: __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __VK_LAYER_NV_optimus=NVIDIA_only VK_LOADER_DRIVERS_SELECT=*nvidia*


$ nvidia-smi
Wed Jan 21 15:17:41 2026       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 580.119.02             Driver Version: 580.119.02     CUDA Version: 13.0     |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 ...    Off |   00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| N/A   40C    P8              2W /   60W |      61MiB /   8188MiB |     43%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+

Hope this helps you to compare.

8

Just did this and everything appears to be running smoothly now. Much thanks to everyone here for all the awesome help!

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