Seeking Guidance on Using NVIDIA RTX A1000 with KDE Plasma 6.1 + Wayland

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1

Dear Forum,

I have been using an IBM ThinkPad P1 Gen 6 for some time now. It features a dedicated NVIDIA graphics card (RTX A1000). So far, I have only been using the integrated graphics card and am very happy with it. However, as I now need to experiment with generative AI image generators, I would like to use the NVIDIA graphics card. I have searched a bit and often found instructions for X11 only. My question is: What is the correct way to use the NVIDIA graphics card with KDE Plasma 6.1 + Wayland?

After my recent research, I am not sure whether this can be fully accomplished through the package management with dnf or if I need to directly take drivers from the NVIDIA website. Attached is a neofetch output of my system.

OS: Fedora Linux 40 (KDE Plasma) x86_64 
Host: 21FVCTO1WW ThinkPad P1 Gen 6 
Kernel: 6.10.11-200.fc40.x86_64 
Uptime: 1 hour, 16 mins 
Packages: 2306 (rpm), 14 (flatpak) 
Shell: zsh 5.9 
Resolution: 2560x1440 
DE: Plasma 6.1.5 
WM: kwin 
Theme: Breeze-Dark [GTK2], Breeze [GTK3] 
Icons: breeze-dark [GTK2/3] 
Terminal: konsole 
CPU: 13th Gen Intel i7-13700H (20) @ 4.800GHz 
GPU: Intel Raptor Lake-P [Iris Xe Graphics] 
GPU: NVIDIA RTX A1000 6GB Laptop GPU 
Memory: 6419MiB / 63963MiB

I am aware that this question is somewhat generic, but I am not quite sure where to start. It is important to me that I do not brick the machine. My hope is that someone here may have a similar configuration and can share some experiences and tips with me.

Thanks,
Sebastian

2

We recommend you use the RPMFusion nvidia drivers.
See Howto/NVIDIA - RPM Fusion

Take special note of the setting up of the secure boot signing key.
Setup that key before you install the drivers.

Also note that it takes a while for the drivers to be built.
This happens in the background.
You can see if its still running by doing systemctl list-jobs.
When there are no jobs running it’s safe to reboot.