Previously, I have posted about the freezing and crashing I experience with KDE Neon. It was pointed out that my initial crashes were the result of an Nvidia card and Wayland. I switched to X11 and the startup crashes dropped way down. I was patient, and thought the next update would solve things. However, it still crashes unpredictably, the latest today when it went to sleep and couldn’t wake up.
Neon is one of two Linux installs, so I can easily do without it. I kinda like Plasma, but this damn thing is giving me more problems than any other distro I have tried. I am leaning strongly to replacing it (top candidate Pop! OS with Nvidia drivers)
I also don’t know how much I can learn from the crash reports. If it is a collision between Plasma and Nvidia, best to replace it, no?
Hi Cliff,
That is disappointing.
I think, if you like KDE, I would try some other distro with plain KDE. The issue may be Neon x Nvidia rather than Plasma x Nvidia.
If you are going to move away from KDE altogether, there is a wide choice of alternative DE’s… but I have no info on which DE interacts best with Nvidia… theoretically if does not matter… the Nvidia drivers are independent of the DE as far as I know.
Sorry you having problems with Neon and KDE. Having repeated problems with software is very frustrating.
Looking on the internet at KDE.org I saw that KDE is also offered on Kubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora, and Manjaro. The site also said KDE.org had community support. Maybe it can help with the problem.
I can recommend Pop!_OS with Nvidia drivers. I’ve used that on a laptop for quite a while without issue. When Ubuntu 24.04 came out I installed that instead and am happy with that as well.
It depends on the issue. If it is a KDE problem, I dare not try another Plasma distro.
I also posted to the KDE forum. One member tried several fixes with me and ended up suggesting a reinstall. He did narrow it down to something with the nouveau driver, but no error messages were reported in journalctl, only that those were the final lines before the crash.
He also had me try to install a proprietary driver, but none of those worked.
I’m gonna wait for more responses, then replace it with Pop!
While the previous 6 versions had their issues (but still performed well), this one takes the cake.
After two different fresh installs, (after coming back from testing a few other distros) with required updates and running for a couple of days, it would boot to an empty screen.
Have driven MX KDE a few times without issues, but it’s not the latest Plasma.
Back to Windows 11 for now with O&O Shutup and its basic tweaks.
You got me going now. MX, it appears, has a dedicated tool for installing Nvidia drivers, and it comes with KDE.
Now, I’d like advice. Should i replace Neon with MX (so as to stick with Plasma) or Pop! (hoping to upgrade one day to Cosmic)? Both have Nvidia driver tools, the likely source of my Neon problems.
I had MX with KDE in the days before plasma and when I still had an Nvidia card. There were no issues, but my experience is from 3 years ago., and my Nvidia card was a very low level card.
I do have MX 23.4 today, but with Xfce and an AMD card.
It is stable.
This is what troubles me about any of my replacement alternatives. I have a GTS 240, using driver 330.xx, which was old when I bought it 3 years ago. Both Pop! and MX supposedly come with drivers, but is there a chance they will default to nouveau anyway? Which defeats the purpose of replacing Neon, right?
Right. But you can force it to install the nvidia driver.
I gave up on my Nvidia card. Bought a AMD RX6400. It was not expensive. Have had no problems , except when it was new Debian did not have the driver, but it has it now.
There is a MX that is suppose to support advance hardware.
" MX Linux – KDE is “Advanced Hardware Support” enabled release that runs well on a wide variety of 64-bit machines."
Are you sure your cards driver is compatable with modern kernels.?
At about kernel 5.19 linux kernel developers changed the kernel interface for driver modules. All driver maintainers simply updated their drivers to match the new interface, except nvidia. Nvidia decided not to update a whole heap of their older drivers… so all the cards they supported (like mine) became unusable with modern kernels.
Now, you need to find out if your card and driver have updated nvidia support for modern kernels. That may be your problem.
If it is your problem, the only solution is to get a new card…
Consider this. I have Ubuntu Maté (6.8 since October) and VMs of Endeavour LXQt (6.6 since Feb) and Zorin (6.5 since March, 6.8 since Sept) and never had an issue i can atttribute to the card. Except with version 6 of KDE Neon beginning in Feb. Neon version 5.27 worked fine with kernel 6.2 for the month i had it.
And isn’t nouveau supposed to work around that problem?
Neville, a random thought.
Could the problem lie in switching from Wayland to Xorg?
When i installed KDE version 6, it used Wayland by default. As a result, it froze during bootup nearly half the time, as i described in a previous thread.
So i switched to Xorg. I forget exactly how, but it was one checked box on a single settings page.
After i did that, bootups occurred normally, but the crashes kept coming as described.
Is there a chance i missed a settings choice somewhere?
It is possible, of course. You may have some trace of wayland still there
and therefore
I wonder if a fresh install starting from X11 would solve it?
Is it worth the effort?
Since i have to install SOMETHING, yes, but what? Choices are: reinstall Neon (but Wayland is default), install MX KDE, or install Pop! with Nvidia drivers.
I could also let that partition lay fallow.
Your inclination?
