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