KDE5/QT5 And Lower Are Anti-Nvidia?

General system Newbie
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For the longest time I’ve had issues with KDE and Nvidia, and later, issues with Qt apps while using WMs.

For my time in KDE, I blamed it on the DE itself: KDE + Nvidia vs Cinnamon + Nvidia
And since I’ve been using WMs more often, I’ve blamed it on my customised themes: Why Does Text For QT Apps Appear Bigger in i3WM? - #23

Additionally, for the last few months I’ve been using plymouth and a grub theme, but noticed that the resolutions for both were pretty low, like 1024x728 (or something like that) on my 1920x1080 screen.

Today, I thought to myself, “Doesn’t my laptop have hybrid graphics? How do I access that?” Then I remembered that many of my laptop’s features are in the BIOS, and I found the option to toggle between Discrete Graphics and Hybrid Graphics. It has been on Discrete for years (since I bought it) because I used to regularly play games, use Blender, etc.

Having switched it to Hybrid and saved the settings, I was greeted with a lovely 1920x1080 resolution for grub and plymouth, and now all the issues I’ve had recently in my WMs have disappeared.

A note about the grub menu: I entered videoinfo prior to the switch and it did show me the low rez above as max, but since switching it, it showed the correct rez after running the same check.

To list the recent issues I’d been having:

  • Dolphin UI (and other Qt5 apps like qt5ct, kvantum, kate, etc.) were bigger in a WM than in Cinnamon
  • Dunst notifications were also bigger
  • Dmenu text was also bigger
  • Plymouth and Grub splashes were low rez
  • Login Manager (Sddm) was also low rez
  • GPU pass-through didn’t work for virtual machines
  • Probably more I can’t remember now, but Dmenu and Dunst shouldn’t have had this issue unless they are relying on some similar libraries to Qt5 :thinking: glib maybe?

PS: Notice I specified Qt5 and KDE5. Qt6 apps had been displaying as expected, even with Discrete Graphics as the default.

PS to my PS: The point of this post isn’t to bash (script :wink:) any tool. It is just to say, if you have been experiencing issues that no one else seems to be experiencing with a similar setup, check your BIOS :laughing:

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Ngreedia is anti-Linux. They have proven that several times. And yes, due to novideas crappy proprietary driver, several Novidea-specific code-paths exist in basically everything that creates something graphical.

So yeah, not surprised that you see differences when using free drivers vs proprietary drivers.

Those issues with the proprietary crap are also the reason why AMD is the biggest GPU player on Linux now:

The steam statistics also show that AMD is used in the majority of Linux systems, while on Windoze Nvidia still is the biggest player by far.

1 Like
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Switch to X11 session.

P.S. Seriously, KDE x11 vs Wayland has very different font rendering, which turns into slightly bigger size.

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I think you’ve misunderstood “hybrid graphics” here. My laptop has the ability to automatically switch between the on-board Intel Graphics and the Nvidia Graphics driver as needed. Hybrid in this case, is still fully proprietary.

But I agree with your other points.

The issue I was having with KDE5 at the time was completely unrelated to Wayland because I’ve only ever used Wayland in a LiveUSB environment like a week ago when I tried out Hyprland.

I no longer use KDE, by the way. Though this “discovery” does mean that I should be able to switch back to KDE as my DE. Definitely won’t happen for at least until KDE6 is released.

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and when you use hybrid, the default that is used by the DE is the intel driver which is also a free driver - therefore you see the difference between free driver and proprietary driver when enabling hybrid mode vs discrete-only-mode.

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Intel’s drivers are FOSS? :hushed:

EDIT: Just did a quick search, and OMG!!! They are! That’s awesome! :partying_face: