From NVIDIA GPU to AMD GPU Switchover

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For the longest time I’ve been using NVIDIA GPU in my PC, and I recently decided to switch to AMD GPU, I picked up a Radeon Sapphire Nitro+ 9070 XT 16GB, and just installed it to my existing system, replacing my Asus RTX 3070 8GB.

But now I’ve entered issues after trying to switch to different GPU drivers. I used the mhwd utility to change GPU drivers, removing NVIDIA drivers completely. What should of been a simple driver switch over has now left me with an unusable system with no graphical interface despite using mhwd to install drivers for AMD GPU.

The system detects the AMD GPU in my system, it even says it has Radeon loaded when I check with inxi - Gx but also says GPU: N/A, Driver also says N/A. I check with lsmod | grep amd and it shows everything with AMD is loaded. I use Xwyland, and KDE Plasma, if I try to run kwin_wayland it says;

No backend specified, automatically choosing DRM

If I try to run plasmashell I get a different kind of error stating the following;

qt.qpa.xcb: could not connect to display
qt.qpa.plugin: From 6.5.0, xcb-cursor0 or libxcb-cursor0 is needed to load the Qt xcb platform plugin.
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "" even though it was found.
This application failed to start because no Qt platform could be initiated. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: vnc, minimal, linuxfb, xcb, wayland-egl, minimalegl, vkkhrdisplay, offscreen, Wayland, eglfs.

Aborted     (core dumped) plasmashell

I don’t know why or what it expects me to reinstall, I’ve tried searching around on the Internet with this exact error message, however leads me to nowhere since its an extremely vague generic error message, its lead me to several pages about users trying to connect over SSH, but this is obviously NOT what I’m trying to do, I’m just trying to do a simple switch over from NVIDIA GPU drivers to AMD GPU drivers, I’m well aware AMD drivers are baked into the Linux kernel and should “just work” but clearly that is not the case here.

I tried to boot into a USB installer of Manjaro KDE, to see if I could fix it from there and I seem to be met with same issue of it too also failing to load into a graphical user interface because of the same XCB error as previously mentioned. So I’m not sure what the deal is here, what am I expected to do to fix this? How do you “fix” XCB Qt plugin and make the AMD GPU driver load properly in to a functional state?

I dont want to have to try reinstall the system from scratch, when even the USB Installer also fails to boot into a GUI with AMD GPU How do you reinstall XCB so Qt can actually see and use it properly? Some extra steps seem to be required to get functional AMD GPU drivers on Linux with Wayland.

2

Try again, and choose “free drivers” rather than the proprietary option.

Assuming that allows you to boot the ISO, entering a chroot environment should allow you to then install drivers as needed.

3

I’ve already tried this but it doesn’t even load a GUI, it just drops me on the CLI after booted.

4

The Manjaro Installer ISO; is it current, and did you check it for consistency?

Some system information as described (below) might reveal something useful.

What happens if you try to boot with another random bootable ISO/USB (perhaps another distribution ISO)? Do the same symptoms appear?

Regards.

What follows is from a standard template.

System Information

Suggested inxi command (use either):
inxi -zv8 (short-form)
inxi --filter --verbosity=8 (long-form)
inxi man pages (manual)
If running `inxi` within a `chroot` environment
  • Add --color=0 to the long-form command, or…
  • Change the short-form command to inxi -zv8c0
Your privacy is respected
5

In the booted ISO it says driver: N/A, advanced graphics data unavailable. Using Free drivers of course.

6

Is that the Manjaro ISO?

What happens when;

8

Yes the Manjaro ISO

I tried with Cinnamon version, while it did boot into a GUI, its unable to detect GPU properly still, meaning its forced and stuck in 1024x768 resolution.

For whatever reason on KDE Plasma version, its just the Qt XCB that’s causing most of the issues, despite not touching anything to do with Qt, only moving from NVIDIA driver to AMD driver, which somehow screwed with Qt XCB.

9

I’m trying to ascertain whether this is limited only to Manjaro or if it happens with other bootable media such as another distribution.

Manjaro Cinnamon is also Manjaro, not another distribution.

Can you obtain a copy of another distributions ISO that has a live environment and see if you can boot with that? Obviously you would need to create an Installer on another computer, perhaps of a friend or family member.

Regarding the ISO used;

  • Did you download the latest available ISO?
  • Did you verify the ISO against the checksum file available from the Download page?
  • If the ISO used is not current, how old is the ISO?
1 Like
10

Even if you have only access to the tty sharing the output of inxi -zv8 would help to stop guessing. Cinnamon runs under X, for Plasma one can choose between X and Wayland where Wayland is the default since version 6. The Wayland session still needs stuff from X for XWayland, that is, to run X applications under Wayland.

This should be in the package xcb-util-cursor. Isn’t this package installed? Looks weird, though. Did you switch between branches at some point?