war story: nVidia proprietary driver abandons my system
My old desktop has used a GTX 650 card since 2013. The Nouveau driver just didn't work for my system. I tried it a few times over the years. Unfortunately nVidia's proprietary driver stopped supporting my card, relegating it to the "legacy" driver. That legacy driver does not get along with Wayland and modern Fedora no longer supports X11. Over the years, I had accumulated a bunch of kernel options in the grub configuration, all to stop Nouveau confusing things. I had to remove them. I edited /etc/default/grub and rebuilt grub's config files using grub2-mkconfig. Nouveau seems to be good enough now (but I no longer stress it with a million FireFox tabs). Old (all one line): GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="resume=UUID=6be9f593-abf3-4151-8b0a-8135946edbb4 rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau,nova_core modprobe.blacklist=nouveau,nova_core nvidia-drm.modeset=1" New: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="resume=UUID=6be9f593-abf3-4151-8b0a-8135946edbb4" Unfortunately, grub itself used a video configuration that displayed illegible characters. Again, a change to /etc/default/grub and a grub2-mkconfig Old: GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="console" New: GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="gfxterm" GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768 I tried 1920x1080 but that didn't help. I don't know why. I don't really know why "console" doesn't work or what "gfxterm" is. I got this from <https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/grub-menu-screen-resolution/138544/2>
On Sat, 25 Jul 2026 10:03:40 -0400 (EDT) "D. Hugh Redelmeier via Talk" <talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote:
My old desktop has used a GTX 650 card since 2013.
The Nouveau driver just didn't work for my system. I tried it a few times over the years.
Hugh, I have used Nvidia video cards in the past, and I even installed their drivers. I am very happy with an AMD card now. The straight Fedora install makes everything work. -- Howard Gibson hgibson@eol.ca http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
I have an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 from a few years back. I recently upgraded my desktop to Ubuntu 26.04 with the nvidia version 595 drivers and all is well - I had previously had video problems re-waking from sleep. Ubuntu 26 is officially Wayland as well. But I disabled the graphical boot with # systemctl set-default multi-user.target as usual, and am happily running Xorg via the startx command and my same old .xinitrc and .Xresources files, with my choice of window manager (fvwm 2). That may not help in your situation, but I tell you I was pleased when I experimenting with a virtual machine and confirmed that I could still use good old X11 in a "modern" OS release. Cheers John
On Sat, Jul 25, 2026 at 10:04 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via Talk < talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote:
Over the years, I had accumulated a bunch of kernel options in the grub configuration, all to stop Nouveau confusing things. I had to remove them. I edited /etc/default/grub and rebuilt grub's config files using grub2-mkconfig. Nouveau seems to be good enough now (but I no longer stress it with a million FireFox tabs).
Old (all one line): GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="resume=UUID=6be9f593-abf3-4151-8b0a-8135946edbb4 rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau,nova_core modprobe.blacklist=nouveau,nova_core nvidia-drm.modeset=1"
New: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="resume=UUID=6be9f593-abf3-4151-8b0a-8135946edbb4"
Unfortunately, grub itself used a video configuration that displayed illegible characters. Again, a change to /etc/default/grub and a grub2-mkconfig
Old: GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="console"
New: GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="gfxterm" GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768
I tried 1920x1080 but that didn't help. I don't know why.
I don't really know why "console" doesn't work or what "gfxterm" is. I got this from < https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/grub-menu-screen-resolution/138544/2
Not sure if this is a suitable workaround, but... Would using a different bootloader make your life easier? For what seems like decades I've not given much heed to grub, which replaced lilo, but it's been starting to show its age. Installing CachyOS introduced me to a number of alternatives, including the recommended one which is limine. Maybe even going back to lilo, which doesn't try at all to be fancy, might be an option. - Evan
From: Evan Leibovitch via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org>
Not sure if this is a suitable workaround, but... Would using a different bootloader make your life easier? For what seems like decades I've not given much heed to grub, which replaced lilo, but it's been starting to show its age. Installing CachyOS introduced me to a number of alternatives, including the recommended one which is limine.
Maybe even going back to lilo, which doesn't try at all to be fancy, might be an option.
LILO was for Master Boot Record booting. As far as I know, it won't work with UEFI booting. There are many other problems that GRUB solved -- like size of boot disks. I don't know limine. It's easier to use a boot loader supported by your distro. systemd has ideas about boot loaders but I haven't studied them. It is quite possible to boot straight to Linux, without a boot loader. (Actually, the UEFI system functions as a boot loader.) I don't know how that interacts with Secure Boot.
There is "eLILO" for efi. I used it on Slackware, until the end of last year, when I switched to CachyOS and Limine. I have Intel cpu/video, so it just works. :-) -- On 2026-07-25 14:16, D. Hugh Redelmeier via Talk wrote:
LILO was for Master Boot Record booting. As far as I know, it won't work with UEFI booting. There are many other problems that GRUB solved -- like size of boot disks.
Hi Hugh, On Sat, Jul 25, 2026 at 10:04 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via Talk < talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote: Nouveau seems to be good enough now (but I no longer stress it with a
million FireFox tabs).
I meant to ask, is this because of Nouveau improvements, a different tab strategy, or an alternative to Firefox? Mike
From: Michael Hill via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org>
On Sat, Jul 25, 2026 at 10:04 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via Talk < talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote:
Nouveau seems to be good enough now (but I no longer stress it with a million FireFox tabs).
I meant to ask, is this because of Nouveau improvements, a different tab strategy, or an alternative to Firefox?
I don't know. I still use Firefox. I do have a lot fewer tabs. That's because this machine is now very secondary. It is no longer my main desktop. Nouveau was crashy for the several times I tried it over the 13 years years. Nouveau is maintained, so relevant bugs might have been fixed. The "legacy" proprietary Nvidia driver is not maintained and it won't work with Wayland. I wonder whether the video RAM might have filled up with all my tabs. If compression were implemented (as is done in the proprietary driver) maybe this limitation would be pushed out.
participants (6)
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D. Hugh Redelmeier -
Evan Leibovitch -
Howard Gibson -
John Sellens -
Michael Hill -
William Park