No Display Using Proprietary Nvidia Drivers

[brianjm]

I recently upgraded to 23.04. After upgrading, I've had issues with my Nvidia graphics card and getting to a desktop. I have a System76 laptop, and added the System76 PPA to get access to things like the keyboard backlighting controls. This PPA also installs the system76-power utility, which allows for switching between the integrated Intel graphics, the dedicated Nvidia graphics, or a hybrid option.

When using the integrated Intel or hybrid graphics, I have no issues getting to a desktop. Unfortunately, I usually leave my laptop connected to another monitor, and performance with the hybrid option is poor (I can't use external displays with the integrated graphics).

Switching to the dedicated graphics option causes issues with booting to a desktop. I get inconsistent results as well. Sometimes I see the Plasma boot screen and then a cursor, but nothing else. Sometimes I don't even make it that far. Switching to another TTY and attempting to run kdestart5 plasmashellgives me this error:

$ kdestart5 plasmashell
qt.qpa.xcb: could not connect to display
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "" even though it was found.
This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: eglfs, linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, off screen, vnc, wayland-egl, wayland, wayland-xcomposite-egl, wayland-xcomposite-glx, xcb.

Aborted (core dumped)​

I have an Nvidia Geforce 2070 graphics card and am using the 535 driver.

Output of nvidia-smi:

$ nvidia-smi       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 525.116.04   Driver Version: 525.116.04   CUDA Version: 12.0     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| 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 ...  Off  | 00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
| N/A   41C    P0    15W /  80W |      6MiB /  8192MiB |      0%      Default |
|                               |                      |                  N/A |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                              
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                  |
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                  GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                   Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0   N/A  N/A      1114      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                  4MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+[/FONT]

[Schwarzer Kater]

Welcome!

I really can not tell if it is even possible to use either Pop!_OS with KDE Plasma or Kubuntu with Pop!_OS repositories and have a pleasant experience without bugs…
Pop!_OS is a specialized GNOME distribution.

Comparing it with Kubuntu 23.04 you will find that:
Pop!_OS uses Ubuntu 22.04 as a base, not Ubuntu 23.04 !
Pop!_OS uses their own modified 6.2.x kernel, not the Ubuntu 6.2.x kernel that is used in Kubuntu 23.04.
Pop!_OS uses their own Mesa 22.3.5, Kubuntu 23.04 uses Mesa 23.0.2.

I guess they also use their own version of Nvidia drivers (I cannot test this) - and that all of their own tools are written with GNOME in mind.

The list will probably go on…

I would suggest to ask the people at System76 about your problem, because you are trying to use their repositories with Kubuntu 23.04.

[claydoh]

Pop!_OS uses Ubuntu 22.04 as a base, not Ubuntu 23.04

yes, this is where a mismatch in packaging and versions will come from.
.However, System76's PPA supports non-LTS releases. It doesn't provide any Nvidia drivers or anything like that, however. Their own official repos have things like that, and only support LTS bases.
The PPA does not provide upgraded kernels or nvidia drivers.

I think this is a general Nvidia-broke issue, where either the xorg configs are borked or a kernel update didn't successfully rebuild the driver module.
It might be worth trying to reinstall the nivida driver, or a different version. This usually rebuilds the modules.
If you have previous kernel installed (you should), you might also try botting to one of those to see if things work there -- A good way to tell if the modules for the current one didn't build.

I really can not tell if it is even possible to use either Pop!_OS with KDE Plasma or Kubuntu with Pop!_OS repositories and have a pleasant experience without bugs…

I don't think the OP is adding Plasma to a Pop OS install, but rather adding hardware support for System76 hardware on Ubuntu installs via System 76's own official PPAs
There are Sytem76's own instructions for adding other desktop environments. Installing the meta-package kubuntu-desktop here might cause issues, but using the much less Ubuntu-heavy kde-standard metapackage won't have any system-level conflicts.

[brianjm]

This is correct, I am not adding KDE Plasma to an existing Pop OS install. The only operating system installed is Kubuntu.

I believe this is a "classic" issue of Nvidia drivers not working after some update or something similar. I did some digging and saw that this error is seems to sometimes occur with Nvidia drivers and Qt. The issue with those other errors is that they are all develpment focused; they were people who were building Qt based applications and having problems, not using Plasma as their desktop or something similar.

The only thing I saw as an option was to downgrade the Nvidia drivers, but a previous attempt to do so didn't fix the issue.

[claydoh]

Try booting to a previous kernel from Grub, which may have a working driver module, then try reinstalling the drivers to force a rebuild for any modules that may need this

You might try this from the command line to see if DKMS successfully rebuilds the module for it.

sudo ubuntu-drivers install

You might also installing a different version
To list:

sudo ubuntu-drivers list

Then

sudo ubuntu-drivers install nvidia:<number>

We can see error messages if any
But using the driver manager is fine as well


https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Nv...rsInstallation

[Spadge]

Turn off Secure Boot in your BIOS.

It took me around 4 hours yesterday to work out that's what was breaking it for me with NV drivers 535 and 6.2.0-25 kernel.

[brianjm]

Turn off Secure Boot in your BIOS.

It took me around 4 hours yesterday to work out that's what was breaking it for me with NV drivers 535 and 6.2.0-25 kernel.

I did not turn off secure boot, but after updating to kernel 6.2.0-26 things seem to be partially working. Some of my applications don't seem to work (KeePassXC being an obvious one) but at least it now boots to the desktop.