My end goal is to get my desktop running functionally like a high-powered Steam Deck with my HDR monitor. I’m beyond fed up with Microsoft and really want a Linux distro to be the primary OS on my PC (and ultimately the only OS once Ubisoft decides to support R6: Siege on Linux). Eventually I’ll switch from my NVIDIA GPU to AMD since everything I’ve read makes AMD out to be far more consumer and Linux friendly than NVIDIA, but in the time being I’d love some help getting this working on my current hardware.
To get KDE Plasma 6 with HDR running, so far I have tried installing the latest HoloIso and Manjaro’s official Plasma desktop stable branch. Before doing all of the below I made sure that the option to use the iGPU ports was disabled in my BIOS.
For HoloIso, I’ve followed the directions from the GitHub readme file and installed from a USB drive to one of my internal 1 TB SSDs. I’m able to boot from the ISO on the USB drive and run the installation tool in HoloIso. The installation seemingly runs successfully and tells me to restart. After restarting and booting into that drive, I see the GRUB menu which disappears quickly, and then I see nothing but a black screen. I have tried booting with both of my monitors connected to my GPU via DisplayPort, and booting with only one monitor connected to my GPU via DisplayPort. Neither seems to solve the issue.
I then went on to try what seemed like a more stable distro that was similar to SteamOS - Manjaro with Plasma. Installation went smoothly and I was able to actually boot into Manjaro after installation. Noticing there was no HDR option in the display settings I did some Googling and found that I was using X11 and not Wayland (which is where the HDR support lies). I did some more Googling and found a guide to switch to Wayland (I can’t find the guide again now dangit) but upon doing so and restarting, all I saw was a black screen.
Honestly, if anyone has any suggestions for what to try I would love some help. I’m familiar with navigating Linux but relatively unfamiliar with installing it and VERY unfamiliar with display technologies so any suggestions for what to try are appreciated.
To get Nvidia working on Arch here is what I did:
During installation of Arch when it asked if I wanted to chroot into my distro I did. However if you enter commandline by hitting CTR+ALT+<F1 or F2 or F3> to change to a virtual console. If you are doing this from a chroot environment you don’t need sudo.
edit the mkinitcpio.conf
sudo nano /etc/mkinitcpio.conf
In the MODULES=() section I added “nvidia nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm” without quotes. So it looked like this:
MODULES=(nvidia nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm)
Afterwards I updated my initramfs images by running:
sudo mkinitcpio -P
Then I edited my grub config:
sudo nano /etc/default/grub
Find the line that says “GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”“”
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nvidia-drm.modeset=1"
Then I updated grub
sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
Note: I use the Nvidia Proprietary drivers
Resources: Arch Wiki
I do not recommend Manjaro especially if you are going to be using the AUR (Arch User Repository) as it can cause things to break.
