On the face of it, my old work laptop should be perfect for Linux. It’s Intel based, drivers are very mature, it has a hefty CPU, 16 GB RAM and a zippy SSD. It was a beast in its day, and it should be able to re-live its glory days as a Fedora box.
My problem is Fedora has moved away from x11 and gone all-in on wayland. But the GeForce 650M GPU this thing shiped with is no longer supported by Nvidia drivers. I need to use the 470 version, which doesn’t seem to work with wayland.
Has anyone gotten akmod-nvidia-470xx/xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-470xx working on Fedora 42? Would I have better luck trying a XFCE spin and installing KDE onto that?
UPDATE 24 Hours Later:
I had mostly answered my question with the idea of changing to the XFCE spin. I wiped it and reinstalled that spin which loads LightDM and an x11 environment. I got it working with that starting point. The irony is: I think I may have actually got there on the old spin also - for some reason the 6.16.9-200.fc42.x86_64 kernel won’t display the LUKS prompt with those 470 drivers loaded. I thought it just wasn’t booting. I’ll never know now.
It’s still a bit glitchy, but I think I’ll sort the remaining issues out. Sometimes when something calls OpenGL, the display goes glitchy, but loading nvidia-settings restores things.
Well XWayland will for work fine with that driver version, but it’s 13 years old at this point. They’ve dropped support in the Nvidia drivers for anything that old, and any kernel upgrades do not guarantee that old 470 driver will continue to work.
May just be time to move on if this the major concern.