Cannot start GNOME Desktop on NVIDIA Wayland

Dave Sizer <[email protected]> Thu, 30 Apr 2026 19:02:43 +0000
Newsgroups gmane.linux.gentoo.user
Message-ID <[email protected]>
I recently installed Gentoo on my gaming PC with an NVIDIA RTX 3090 
discreet GPU (and no integrated graphics). I followed the handbook as 
closely as I could, I set the VIDEO_CARDS use variables accordingly, and 
got gnome-light installed and gdm enabled under systemd.

I can sucessfully start an X11 GNOME session via GDM, but when I try to 
use Wayland, a black screen briefly appears, and then I am presented again 
with the GDM login screen, although now it is in a broken state until I 
manually restart GDM.

Looking through the system logs, this seems to be the root cause:

> GPU /dev/dri/card0 chosen as primary is not supported by EGL.

I am able to reproduce this same error by invoking

> gnome-shell --wayland

manually from the virtual terminal.

The driver appears to be loading correctly, seeing as X11 GNOME works, and 
the nvidia-smi command also works and confirms that I am using driver 
595.58.03 and my card is detected.

I have tried all of the troubleshooting steps from [1] and [2] that seem 
relevant, to no avail. One last piece of info that I found interesting was 
that in the syslog it seems like GDM itself is able to initialize a 
Wayland session, but gnome-shell itself fails to do so when I log in, with 
the error above.

I am hoping someone here has some hints on how to debug/fix this.

 	- Dave

[1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GNOME/Guide#GNOME_on_Wayland_session_is_not_launching_with_NVIDIA
[2] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GNOME/GDM#GDM_crashes_when_attempting_to_launch_a_GNOME_Wayland_session