Tried switching to Fedora KDE Plasma, have issues with nvidia driver
Solved
I was idiotically installing a legacy driver instead of the current driver. I installed the current one and it is now working.
Background on Tildes
For background I posted about distro recommendations a few weeks ago: https://tildes.net/~tech/1ji6/switching_to_linux_looking_for_distro_recommendations. I settled on Fedora KDE Plasma.
Steps taken before the problem
I installed Fedora onto an unallocated space on my SSD, alongside Windows 10. I have tested that Windows 10 is currently working, and that Fedora starts normally. I have also used the boot media to install onto my laptop with no issues. However, on my desktop before installing GPU drivers for my GTX 970, I found Fedora to be quite buggy. This would include the session freezing and needing to be restarted , or my screen would go black with text saying something along the lines "desktop session cannot be unlocked, press ctrl + alt + f3 and login and run a command (I cannot remember the command)" and then I could switch back to my previous session. Overall, it was a buggy mess. My thought process was that it may be a GPU driver issue, and so I started the process of installing RPM fusion and installing the driver from there. I have a GTX 970, so I followed the section titled "Legacy GeForce 8/9/200/300" on this page: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryHowto%5Cb%29. The commands I ran after installing RPM were: sudo dnf update -y and sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-340xx akmod-nvidia-340xx and followed all the prompts provided as necessary. I would then leave my computer for about 30min, before returning and restarting (thinking that a restart may be necessary to be fully using the drivers).
Current Situation
After going through the process listed above, I turned my computer on and booted into Fedora. My screen would hang on a black screen with a flashing white underscore at the top left corner. The computer would not get past this point, no matter how long it was left. Hitting "ctrl + alt + f2" would give me a working terminal that I could interact with, showing the basic CLI of Linux working. I did not play around much with the commands, but I do know the basic shutdown now command was working.
Troubleshooting Steps Tried
I was thinking that it may be due to the driver being X11 and I am running Wayland. I searched online and results seemed to indicate that this would not cause an issue
(I will add more steps here when people recommend them)
Note: I am not a Fedora user and I haven't used RPM fusion, so this is a best guess based on my experience with nvidia on arch and ubuntu.
The 340 drivers are quite old, I would recommend trying out the latest driver. The NVIDIA recommended version for the GTX 970 is 550.127.05. You can see that the 970 is supported on the 'Supported Products' tab of the link i provided.
Here's the link to the rpm fusion install guide for the latest drivers
https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA#Current_GeForce.2FQuadro.2FTesla
If for some reason you choose to stick with the 340 drivers, rpm fusion does explicitly state that they only work with the current stable X11 version and were considered EOL as of 2019.
On my arch linux install KDE Plasma has a way to swap to X11 pretty easily from Wayland, it may be worth giving that a shot as well.
That makes sense, I assumed maybe wrongly that each header was for the specific series of cards. I will try the current driver that you suggested. The RPM fusion page just confused me as there was a lot of nvidia terms used, and since I just recently got this card I am not familiar with them.
You were correct, I just downloaded the wrong driver. It is working now. Thank you, it feels like an idiotic mistake now
I'm also on Fedora KDE Plasma (Wayland) with a newer machine (with a 4090), and had had a lot of similar problems with my display. After upgrading to a 560 series driver when it became available in RPMFusion over the summer, most of my hiccups have been fixed.
One thing that I've found is I still sometimes get the flashing white underscore in the top left that you describe (i.e., the text mode cursor) but it only and reliably happens under a very specific condition: if my monitor wasn't displaying from that machine when Linux started up (I have both a docking station for my work laptop and a work desktop also plugged into this monitor). Then I can do the
ctrl-alt-f2thing that you mentioned.If I forget that, then usually putting the other machines to sleep so that the monitor doesn't try to switch to them and then rebooting resolves it when that happens.
Another thing I've found is that from the text terminal I can run
startplasma-waylandto try to manually kick-start the desktop instead of rebooting. That's also proven reliable since I found out about that command.