Keep 23.11 Nouveau in 24.05

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1

I have a Thinkpad W520 with Optimus graphics and two external screens. They work with 23.11 but not with 24.05 – only one of the two external screens is driven.
So I presume the easiest answer is somehow to force the use of the Nouveau drivers from 23.11 in an otherwise 24.05 installation. Is that possible? Is it the right way? How do I do it?

The only specific configuration of graphics in my setup is

services.xserver.videoDrivers = [ "modesetting" ];

so as I understand it the Nouveau drivers are pulled-in by default, just because there’s no specification of the proprietary drivers to override Nouveau.

2

What boot.kernelPackages are you using? You could probably get things working by setting that to the version that you were using in your 23.11 config (linux_6_1 by default).

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3

That was an excellent idea but

boot.kernelPackages = pkgs.linuxPackages_6_1;

didn’t help. Puzzling. Does anyone have any other suggestions?

4

Makes it sound like the issue is higher up in the stack than nouveau. Maybe the desktop environment?

5

The configuration.nix on the two machines is the same.

6

Sure but a lot changed in nixos between 23.11 and 24.05. Pretty much everything in the desktop environment stack probably had a version update. Any one of those updates could have caused the problem.

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