KDE Plasma not starting after installing Nvidia non-free driver on 2012 MacBook Pro

ok, so post output from:
lspci | grep nvidia

I did a net-install of macOS. Mountain Lion was a blast from the past. gfxcardstatus version 2.2.1 wasn’t available as a packaged release, so I installed 2.3 (after manually allowing some certificates globally in Keychain).

When I selected “Discrete”, it automatically switched back to “Dynamic”. I selected “Integrated” after that.

Screen Shot 2022-09-14 at 4.32.47 PM

Then I reinstalled Plasma Manjaro and ran,

pamac install nvidia-390xx-utils linux515-nvidia-390xx lib32-nvidia-390xx-utils libxnvctrl-390xx

Then did a reboot.

Didn’t seem to have the desired affect,

~> nvidia-smi
Thu Sep 15 08:09:16 2022       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 390.154                Driver Version: 390.154                   |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GT 650M     Off  | 00000000:01:00.0 N/A |                  N/A |
| N/A   64C    P0    N/A /  N/A |    292MiB /   981MiB |     N/A      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                               
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID   Type   Process name                             Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0                    Not Supported                                       |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
~> inxi -G
Graphics:
  Device-1: Intel 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics driver: i915 v: kernel
  Device-2: NVIDIA GK107M [GeForce GT 650M Mac Edition] driver: nvidia
    v: 390.154
  Device-3: Apple FaceTime HD Camera (Built-in) type: USB driver: uvcvideo
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 21.1.4 driver: X:
    loaded: modesetting,nvidia unloaded: nouveau gpu: i915,nvidia
    resolution: 2880x1800~60Hz
  OpenGL: renderer: GeForce GT 650M/PCIe/SSE2 v: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 390.154
~> lspci | grep nvidia
~> 

I’m thinking I should just accept that this machine isn’t a hard-core gaming or 3D rendering machine. Getting the Nvidia drivers running isn’t straight forward on this mac specific hardware - especially for someone like me who hasn’t explored this stuff before. I might go back to the simpler open-source drivers.

thats why i asked for the lspci | grep nvidia output, to get nvidias busid, to create a conf that should switch to discrete only, if it would work of course…

gfxcardstatus version 2.2.1 wasn’t available

As far as I know it has to be 2.2.1, later versions have a problem activating the Intel (although yours does show in inxi). Check the arch wiki link at your first thread: KDE Plasma not starting after installing Nvidia non-free driver on 2012 MacBook Pro - #15 by 6x12

Wouldn’t it be possible to offload to the Nvidia GPU manually? Wild guess following how it works with prime-run, we can try to see the result with these commands:

glxinfo | grep vendor
__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __VK_LAYER_NV_optimus=NVIDIA_only __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia glxinfo | grep vendor

Give result of both commands, if you don’t have glxinfo installed, install mesa-utils package first.

//EDIT: maybe it requires a proper xorg configuration file, maybe driver 390 can’t work like that.