My end goal is to get my desktop running functionally like a high-powered Steam Deck with my HDR monitor. I’m beyond fed up with Microsoft and really want a Linux distro to be the primary OS on my PC (and ultimately the only OS once Ubisoft decides to support R6: Siege on Linux). Eventually I’ll switch from my NVIDIA GPU to AMD since everything I’ve read makes AMD out to be far more consumer and Linux friendly than NVIDIA, but in the time being I’d love some help getting this working on my current hardware.

To get KDE Plasma 6 with HDR running, so far I have tried installing the latest HoloIso and Manjaro’s official Plasma desktop stable branch. Before doing all of the below I made sure that the option to use the iGPU ports was disabled in my BIOS.

For HoloIso, I’ve followed the directions from the GitHub readme file and installed from a USB drive to one of my internal 1 TB SSDs. I’m able to boot from the ISO on the USB drive and run the installation tool in HoloIso. The installation seemingly runs successfully and tells me to restart. After restarting and booting into that drive, I see the GRUB menu which disappears quickly, and then I see nothing but a black screen. I have tried booting with both of my monitors connected to my GPU via DisplayPort, and booting with only one monitor connected to my GPU via DisplayPort. Neither seems to solve the issue.

I then went on to try what seemed like a more stable distro that was similar to SteamOS - Manjaro with Plasma. Installation went smoothly and I was able to actually boot into Manjaro after installation. Noticing there was no HDR option in the display settings I did some Googling and found that I was using X11 and not Wayland (which is where the HDR support lies). I did some more Googling and found a guide to switch to Wayland (I can’t find the guide again now dangit) but upon doing so and restarting, all I saw was a black screen.

Honestly, if anyone has any suggestions for what to try I would love some help. I’m familiar with navigating Linux but relatively unfamiliar with installing it and VERY unfamiliar with display technologies so any suggestions for what to try are appreciated.

  • @[email protected]
    2•5 months ago

    I’m on endeavour, though i also really liked manjaro. in terms of nvidia+wayland I’d say it’s very flaky.

    • vrr works SOMETIMES. i have to log out and in 2-3 times into my account until the option shows in the settings, and also functions as proven using vrrtest-git
    • standby corrupts cuda and you’ll need to modprobe or reboot to fix it.
    • hdr shows up but looks really grey and colorless for me, but it might be my monitor’s edid being faulty. kde’s sdr color vibrance option didn’t help.
    • external screens are dropping frames, down to 30fps, where it was fine on windows with 60.

    Keep in mind this is a 3060 laptop gpu. that means it could well be due to mux switching or whatever else. nonetheless i think nvidia seems more reliable on xorg as of this point in time, and I’m not going to buy another nvidia gpu.

    this might not apply to desktop cpus at all but i thought I’d share these in case someone else has the issues as well and knows a fix, or knows for sure it’s better on desktop, so i can reconsider my stance for a tower build 🤔