I’m using KDE Plasma on Wayland, running NVIDIA drivers version 570.124.04, fully updated using yay -Syyu.
There is currently a bug being tracked with this driver version that causes the issue I’ve mentioned. You can find it here.
I’m trying to work around this issue, here’s what I’ve tried and failed:
I’ve tried downgrade lib32-nvidia-utils nvidia nvidia-utils libxnvctrl nvidia-settings and moving all of those to version 570.86.16 as that version doesn’t have the issue. However, I can’t boot into the graphical environment at all, being stuck on the startup console (had to upgrade back to 570.124.04);
I’ve tried to disable turning off the display at the lock screen, but “Power Management” has “Turn off screen” at “Never”, but “When locked: 1 minute” is grayed out, so I can’t disable that either.
The correct solution would be downgrading to 570.86.16 while they fix the issue, but I can’t boot into the graphical interface if I do that.
Technically I could switch to X11 but I really want to avoid doing that for various reasons.
I managed to figure it out myself eventually, so I’m posting it here for posterity. If you’re running into this problem, downgrading your NVIDIA drivers does fix it. If you need to know how to downgrade it, read on.
I think nvidia are drivers that are dependant on the kernel version; downgrading them separately from the kernel causes breakage (one of the reasons “selective” upgrading/downgrading is not recommended in general). However, nvidia-dkms has dynamic kernel support and will be compiled for your needs, supporting any kernel.
So I ran nvidia-inst --32 which removed nvidia and installed nvidia-dkms for me automatically. I restarted the computer for good measure.
Then, I ran downgrade lib32-nvidia-utils nvidia-dkms nvidia-utils libxnvctrl nvidia-settings and selected the version I wanted to downgrade to, same version for all packages, of course.
Then I restarted, and it worked. I tested the issue with locking the screen and it took a while for the monitor to react, but ultimately it did, so the issue is fixed by downgrading the version.
My issue can be considered resolved (I have IgnorePkg = lib32-nvidia-utils libxnvctrl nvidia-dkms nvidia-settings nvidia-utils on my `/etc/pacman.conf until a proper fix is released). Thanks to whomever might have read this and tried to find a solution, and I hope my learning can be of assistance to others.