Cinnamon 3.6 oddity with newer Nvidia drivers (16.04)

So this may sound like I’m beginning to break a lot of things again, but hear me out.

In order to get to the new 396.54 driver for DXVK, I had to update my kernel to 4.17.3 on 16.04, while having to get libssl1.1 from a 18.04 .deb.

That didn’t solve it, so i used ppa:johnathonf/gcc to install gcc-7 and corrected the symlinks for gcc, g++ and cpp.

The driver INSTALLED! Finally! After wrestling with bad kernel DKMS build results and bad gcc versions.

One problem remains though:

When I go to do the ForceFullCompositionPipeline fix, each time on first boot, the desktop refuses to show. Only a cursor appears.

But, when i plug in and out the monitor, like magic, the desktop reappears.

Then I removed the ForceFullCompositionPipeline entry in xorg.conf and the desktop appears again when Xserver starts up after logging out and logging back in.

FWIW, I’m on Cinnamon DE 3.6.7 and Xorg 1.18.4 with SDDM as the login/DM. One of these is causing the issue with the Composition Pipeline and I’m not sure which. When playing DXVK Vulkan games, I get the usual Nvidia screen tearing issue crop up again.

Should I trash my 16.04 install and do a fresh 18.04 install with the new Cinnamon and Xserver 1.19.6 and see if it’s any better?

Edit: 2 monitors boots/logins fine with the CompositionPipeline added to xorg.conf. Logging in on 1 monitor remains blank. This is some really weird behavior here. Also, disconnecting the second monitor completely freezes the screen, but everything underneath is still interactive. Once again, booting with one monitor, but then unplugging and replugging back in the monitor when the cursor appears helps to see the desktop again…

From the lack of replies, I have to assume Xorg 1.18.4 is ancient history and to literally EXPECT breakage of stuff with “too new” drivers.

Dual monitor works for now, but to truly fix it, I have to fresh install 18.04. (I don’t trust the distro update not to break anything.)

I’ll likely get around to that first day of 2019. 16.04 is finally showing it’s age, badly.

Did a risky step and tried to update to xserver-xorg-hwm-16.04. (1.19.6 for 16.04)

It broke SDDM’s login screen and didn’t resolve tearing with ForceCompositingPipeline off. (I use auto-login anyways though, but I’m already trapped in being unable to downgrade Xserver again, the same thing that broke my other Ubuntu system, but in the very least this works.)

Must be Cinnamon 3.6 at fault, and I cannot upgrade that because Cinnamon doesn’t backport, but instead EOLs.

Downgraded back to 1.18.4. using xserver-xorg-lts-xenial. Did not fix the broken SDDM login screen so that’s permanently broken now.

Also, all Wine and OpenGL games crash on startup now. Wined3d doesn’t work, PBA doesn’t work, only thing that works is DXVK.

Goddamn it. I screwed up another installation.

Edit: Now on 18.04.1 freshly installed with Cinnamon 3.8 and Nvidia 396.54.06. Had to reinstall the driver a few times due to Mesa overwriting some files. I will finally give a sigh of relief once everything’s back up to speed.

Edit 2: Fully migrated to 18.04.1 with restoring backups and using a clean install… after dealing with broken symlinks for libGL*… Sweet release.