Issues with Wayland and X11

Issues & Assistance
1

So I’ve been having screen freeze issues with Wayland and from my (limited) research it appears to be an upstream bug so I moved over to X11 temporarily so I could have a stable environment, I am running KDE, and pretty well reliably re-create the issue by going into settings → Night Light and adjusting the Night light temperature slider.

Using X11, now whenever my screen wakes up, it takes an average of 30-45 seconds for the password prompt to appear.

System specs:
AMD 9900X
64GB of RAM
Nvidia 4080 Super - driver version 570.144

I can’t seem to win with Wayland or X11, has anyone else run into this and is there any fix action?

2

That sounds frustrating. You’re definitely not the only one running into weird issues with Wayland and X11—especially with KDE and Nvidia.

On Wayland, that screen freeze when adjusting the Night Light temperature is a known problem. It’s tied to how KDE handles gamma correction, and Nvidia’s proprietary drivers don’t always play nicely with that. Some people have had better luck by adding nvidia-drm.modeset=1 to their kernel params and enabling early KMS, but even then, it’s not 100% reliable.

On X11, the slow wake-up delay you’re seeing (30–45 seconds for the lock screen prompt) could be caused by how Nvidia handles power management or screen resumption.

Try:

  • Tweaking the compositor settings. setting tearing prevention to “None” or change how it handles resume.
  • Check your logs (~/.xsession-errors or use journalctl) right after the issue happens to see what’s stalling.
  • You can also try rolling back from the 570 drivers to 545, or switching to the open kernel modules.
  • If you’re on KDE 6, keep in mind it’s still a bit rough around the edges.

As a workaround, you could disable KDE’s Night Light completely and use something like Redshift. It’s not as nicely integrated but tends to behave more consistently.

3

Arch Wiki link:

4

drm.modeset is enabled out of the box all time.

Sounds like an nvidia issue, please report it to them.

5

Thank you all for the replies. I will try some of the things suggested, but long term its looking like I may be better off with an AMD card (if I can get my hands on one) as it has built-in support in the kernel and may perform better for my intended usage.

I don’t do a ton of gaming, and when I do I wouldn’t necessarily consider it system taxing.

6

Also to add (I meant to mention this and forgot about it) … it’s not just this where I’ve seen the behavior, I’ve noticed also if I’m playing a video from YouTube for example in another browser window, also presumably due to the Nvidia driver issues.

I can reliably get it to crash however by using the Night Light feature to re-create the issue.

Hopefully a fix gets delivered upstream soon for this.