Switched GPU, now several programs don't work

I was having unbearable stutter issues with my Nvidia 970, so I’ve replaced it with an AMD card, and all seems to be well in terms of stability, vsync, etc.

However, some programs don’t work properly. Here’s a list of the damage that I’ve found so far:

  • Devilspie2 fails to launch with error “An X11 display is required for devilspie2.”
  • Tint2 doesn’t know about some windows, like gnome-terminal, or the package manager GUI.
  • Several services I use/created seem to need to start on a later trigger now, or they complain that there’s no display.
  • Programs do not remember their saved layouts, like OBS, for which the saved layout is very important.
  • imwheel fails to launch with this error: “Could not open display, check shell DISPLAY variable, and export or setenv it!”. This is one of the services which probably needs to start later, as manually restarting the service or just running imwheel works.

I’m sure there are plenty of other issues like this I haven’t found, too.

I’m on Gnome, and the X11 display is indeed working fine other than these issues. $DISPLAY is :0 as I think it always was.

It seems like some method of finding the X server, a method which some applications use but not all, is partially or completely failing now.

I noticed the same thing when I switched from proprietary Nvidia drivers to the open-source ones too. Maybe it’s a setting Nvidia left behind? Should I use mhwd to fully uninstall the nvidia drivers? It would mean plugging my Nvidia card back in just to do that as far as I can tell…

Thanks in advance for any help.

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Please post the output of inxi -Gazy. I suspect GNOME shell simply switched to Wayland which was previously disabled when the nvidia driver was detected.

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Graphics:
  Device-1: AMD Fiji [Radeon R9 FURY / NANO Series] driver: amdgpu v: kernel 
  bus-ID: 26:00.0 chip-ID: 1002:7300 class-ID: 0300 
  Device-2: Logitech HD Pro Webcam C920 type: USB 
  driver: snd-usb-audio,uvcvideo bus-ID: 1-8:3 chip-ID: 046d:082d 
  class-ID: 0102 serial: <filter> 
  Display: wayland server: X.org 1.20.11 compositor: gnome-shell v: 3.38.4 
  driver: loaded: nvidia display-ID: 0 resolution: <missing: xdpyinfo> 
  OpenGL: renderer: AMD Radeon R9 Fury Series (FIJI DRM 3.35.0 
  5.4.114-1-MANJARO LLVM 11.1.0) 
  v: 4.6 Mesa 21.0.3 direct render: Yes

wait… is it using Wayland? :smiley:
that might explain it lol

Seems like it. Is XWayland installed?

the package xorg-xwayland is installed, yes. There’s quite a few others here which talk about compatibility between X and Wayland.

Would you recommend I try to make Wayland compatible, or switch back to using X?

EDIT: I logged out and launched Gnome as an X session, and all the problems are solved. Thank you pobrn.
I might try to get everything working well on Wayland in future, but for now this is probably fine.

You might find it easier to switch back to X11. If you have time though, you might want to see if you can find a solution to some of them.

You’ll probably not find any solution to this one. See here.

The others seem solvable. For those that say “no X11 display found”, it could that XWayland is not started early/quickly enough. You could try having an xterm open to keep XWayland running and try running Devilspie2, imwheel. You could also try running them from the terminal after confirming that the DISPLAY environmental variable is set.

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