I just installed EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma onto my Lenovo Thinkpad T16, with the 16:10 2560x1600 screen. The installation went fine and I booted into the OS. Firefox works fine, but none of the settings menus or the taskbar work properly.
In the settings menus I can’t click on anything. I wanted to change my display settings to zoom in (because this high-res screen makes everything fairly small), but I can’t actually select any of the options. I can’t scroll through the options, and it all glitches around. However, I can move the window around and resize it.
Similarly, the taskbar isn’t displaying properly. When I hover over certain parts of the taskbar I get little popups that show I’m hovering over an icon for an open application (settings, Firefox, etc) but there is no icon there. However, I can go into edit mode and move the taskbar to different locations on the screen.
When I open the launcher menu I can’t select any apps to open them.
So the entire system is completely unusable. I assume it has something to do with my high-res 16:10 screen, or maybe with the iris xe graphics. Unfortunately I can’t even open a terminal to install any new drivers.
I wonder if I should switch to Gnome, or maybe just go to Fedora. But maybe I’ll just have the same issue with Gnome or any DE in Fedora.
I can’t upload videos so I put it on YouTube. Here’s a link so you can see a bit of the glitching interface. Again, it only happens with the KDE interface:
Edit: posting output of inxi -Fz would be useful (use coding bracket forum function to wrap code)
Also there are a couple of threads about the Intel iris Xe graphics driver. I never had problem on my Lenovo carbon but seems that some users run into trouble with hardware drivers.
Maybe you could try to remove or add the following driver to test it out (then reboot). Or search the forum for threads with that keyword that may help,
Users with newer ~12th gen IGP’s may see issues where plasma desktop is almost unusable. It appears to be an issue with accelerated items. Running glxgears will report a high frame rate, but the animation will not be updated. A possible solution here is to change the driver under X.
Basically edit the file with you favorite editor. Possible that you may need to open as root like
Beautiful find, thanks. I found a solution that works perfectly for now, do I’ll lay it out here for anybody else who runs into the problem.
I searched for other instances of: /usr/lib/dri/i965_dri.so failed
I found this reddit post which suggested installing mesa-amber:
This also required me uninstalling mesa, and I don’t know if that will cause other problems.
So my system is working fine now. I don’t know for sure if I’m getting the full power of the Iris XE graphics or not. Optimization will have to wait. I might still end up switching to Gnome if this solution doesn’t prove to be stable.
Glad if it helped in anyways. I tend to not follow reddit, there is good and bad advice, it’s a bit a jungle. Will see if some more knowledgabke peps chime in here at some point!
OK that’s interesting, about conflicts between Alder Lake and KDE. It might still better to use Gnome than to hack around and try to make KDE work. I was on the fence between the two anyway. It’s too late to reinstall tonight, but this is good information.
I like both, but currently running gnome and another session with Dwm. Sometimes I also use i3wm. If you get the workflow you may either love or hate gnome. To me using workspaces for different tasks makes sense and keyboard to search apps. Others prefer the classical desktop layout.
On my older laptops I was alternating between i3 and XFCE. I absolutely love tiling window managers, and at this point I can hardly stand the messiness of floating windows. But accessing settings is a nuisance in i3, and I had problems in Eclipse with creating GUIs while in i3, so I would use XFCE for those things. Plasma plus a tiling script lets me easily combine both those things. But I’m pretty sure Gnome will do the same thing.
I’m reading more stories about problems with KDE, “older” kernels, and Alder Lake CPUs. I’m currently on the LTS 5.15 kernel so maybe I’ll stick to the newest one and switch to Gnome for a fresh install.
@pattmayne
Did you install the mesa-amber package? That would have been my suggestion.
Edit: Based on the log
[ 16.870] (EE) AIGLX error: dlopen of /usr/lib/dri/i965_dri.so failed (/usr/lib/dri/i965_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)
[ 16.870] (EE) AIGLX error: unable to load driver i965
I did, and it worked. But I read so many accounts of conflicts between alder lake CPUs and KDE that I decided to avoid KDE rather than chase after hacks. I’m running Gnome Wayland now and it’s a much smoother experience.
It’s not a KDE thing. The fact is it’s an Intel Iris issue. Gnome runs Wayland by default KDE does not but you can run Wayland now on KDE. Lots of people are using it daily without issue. The Alder lake cpu is the issue. I personally do not like Intel Iris xe graphics. Too problematic.
Out of curiosity you could try to login the X11 session in gnome to see if that is an issue or not. My post from arch wiki above specified problem/solution with Intel alderlake and plasma specifically. Maybe useful to know whether it’s really X11/Wayland related problem or not. Likely not.
Users with newer ~12th gen IGP’s may see issues where plasma desktop is almost unusable. It appears to be an issue with accelerated items. Running glxgears will report a high frame rate, but the animation will not be updated. A possible solution here is to change the driver under X.
Read post #6 with arch wiki link (this text is from wiki …), or you think this is unrelated to issue?
Edit: it also offers a simple solution, if it works.
