Hey guys,

I figured this is probably the best place for this issue since this might be Plasma5 related; but if you think there's a better place, please let me know.

I’m having some really weird issues with my card.
I’m using the GeForce GTX 1060 6GB (driver: nvidia-driver-450) with my Kubuntu 20.10 box.
I have three monitors setup, one vertical, one horizontal, and one XP-Pen art tablet.

There are a couple separate issues, but I’m almost certain they’re related.

These issues seem to only occur after my computer’s been locked and I wake it to log back in. Sometimes the vertical screen totally blanks out except for the mouse, but nothing else works; I can’t right click and I can’t drag a window in from another screen - it just disappears, even though the mouse is still visible.

However, if I reboot my machine and login from a fresh boot, I don’t get these issues. They only start after I’ve locked my machine and logged back in.

If the vertical screen comes up blank (this is the one that almost always does it - but occasionally one of the others will do it too), I usually have to alter a video setting then change it back for the screen to light back up again.

All of the symptoms get a bit difficult to describe; so I upped a quick 1:23 min video so you can see what I’m talking about.

https://youtu.be/R1SE1U9XUuI

As you’ll see in the video, when I start an application, everything blacks out except for the newly launched window and the panels. I usually have to click on a desktop to get it to draw everything again.

If anybody thinks they know what’s going on, or what setting I have set wrong, I would be really appreciative if you could help me figure this out.

Thank you

Is this also happening with the nouveau driver?

Huh - Good question. I'll load it and see.

Yes - it is. Huh. That's pretty weird, right? It's gotta be either some setting then. It's not the card because this was happening with my last card as well. And it's not anything the monitors are feeding back to the card because I just got two new monitors. What's strange is that the vertically set monitors have always been the ones to get weird at login. Of course, all of the screens show all of the other behaviors - but the "pure black, mouse only" behavior mostly only occurs with the vertically set monitors.

The problem with using the nouveau driver, however, is that I build apps that utilize the CUDA framwork; which I can't use - apparently - if I don't have the proprietary driver running the card.

So - whoops.

Since I activated the nouveau driver, my box won't boot. Man, I have no idea what's going on. I mean, even as a software engineer - this sort of thing goes right over my head. I'm in awe of those of you who know deep *nix stuff inside and out. I should probably broaden my horizons. hah

Ok, now ... how to get my box back up? Would this even be something updating grub would fix?

That is indeed weird, you mean not boot at all or just not loading Plasma? If it is just the GUI missing you can remove the driver via a shell, else I think something else is causing problems. Can you at least go to Grub? Else I suggest starting with a Live stick of your current Kubuntu version

It turns out there was more than one issue at play.

I spent the rest of yesterday and the better part of this morning getting everything up and running. If you're interested, this is what I've found ...

First things first; my USB "KVM" switch was funneling power across from one machine to the other. Normally this is not an issue, but I became aware of it when my boot attempts weren't even posting your typical boot processes after everything got gummed up. When I performed a cold boot (or attempted to) I noticed that the MB was still receiving power - even after power-cycling with the on/off switch - the lights were still shining brightly. So, I unplugged one thing at a time. I figured there was either a short or something was simply designed to do this. It turned out to be the KVM switch - which now makes sense because it takes a third USB plug power-source in the case that you want to share something like an external hard drive.

I can only assume that it was feeding circuits and different memory registers which needed to be cleared in order to perform a typical reboot. Something I'll now have to pay more attention to.

At any rate, I think there is just something amiss with the repository implementation of the NVIDIA driver. I logged into tty2 and installed NVIDIA's version of their driver instead of the version supplied by the apt repository. And voila - the issues are all gone. Every single one of them.

It's nice to have my machine up and running again without any "gah, I guess I'll just deal with it" sort of issue.