[SOLVED] OpenGL no longer work on X11 after system upgrade

Kiratsune · 2026-05-05 12:42:20

After upgrading my system yesterday (through sudo pacman -Syu, I needed to do this to install VLC plugins to play MP4 videos), X11 no longer opens openGL programs and makes them immediately crash as soon as it tries. Most importantly, this includes Konsole and Dolphin, so on X11 I can't even use my command line or browse my files. Wayland works perfectly fine, with the caveat that trying to launch Minecraft returns "GLFW error 65542: GLX: No GLXFBConfigs returned." I'm brand new to this forum so apologies for any dumb mistakes I make. Here's the stack traces from trying to launch Dolphin:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ … 7fafa7237&

Mod edit: replaced oversized images with URLs. Please see the general guidelines for rules regarding embedding images in your posts. -- WorMzy

Last edited by Kiratsune (2026-05-05 18:36:50)

fam007e · 2026-05-05 13:06:40

Diagnosis

The crash is in libqxcb-glx-integration.so — Qt's XCB-GLX bridge is aborting on initialization. Combined with Wayland working fine but X11 GLX being completely broken, and the Minecraft No GLXFBConfigs returned on XWayland, this is a broken GLX layer system-wide, not a Qt or Dolphin bug.

The most common cause after pacman -Syu on Arch is a kernel/NVIDIA driver version mismatch — the kernel got bumped but the NVIDIA module wasn't rebuilt for it.

Confirm the Cause

Run these in a Wayland terminal (since X11 is broken):

# Check if the nvidia module is even loaded
lsmod | grep nvidia

# Check kernel vs driver
uname -r
nvidia-smi  # if this errors, driver isn't loaded

# Check for GLX errors directly
glxinfo 2>&1 | head -30

Fixes

If NVIDIA proprietary driver (most likely):

# Check what's installed
pacman -Q | grep nvidia

# If using nvidia-dkms which could imo be better for Arch:
sudo dkms autoinstall
# or force reinstall:
sudo pacman -S nvidia-dkms linux-headers

# If using non-DKMS nvidia package:
sudo pacman -S nvidia  # only works if kernel headers match

Then reboot and test X11.

Nuclear option if unsure:

pacman -Q | grep -E "nvidia|mesa|vulkan|libgl"

Paste that output — it'll make the exact fix obvious. So, usually, "Wayland-works-but-X11-doesn't" pattern is almost always NVIDIA driver not loaded.

Last edited by fam007e (2026-05-05 13:08:17)

Kiratsune · 2026-05-05 13:32:33

I was using the standard nvidia drivers (nvidia-open), so I decided to try downloading the dkms version, since I had already tried updating the open version prior without any success, but still nothing... Here's the output of all the commands you gave me (the very first one is the "nuclear option"):
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ … ff0a34d48&
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ … 168dcaaea&

Mod edit: replaced oversized images with URLs. Please see the general guidelines for rules regarding embedding images in your posts. -- WorMzy

Last edited by WorMzy (2026-05-05 16:36:42)

seth · 2026-05-05 15:48:51

Please don't embed large images and never post images of text, post the text.

Dolphin is a a flatpak, are all affected clients flatpaks?
Why are those not the repo versions?
Does glxgears work on X11?

Kiratsune · 2026-05-05 17:07:56

My apologies, but yes you're right, all the affected clients ARE flatpaks, I decided to simply run "flatpak update", and it turns out that Mesa, nvidia-595-71-05 and nvidia VAAPI driver were all flatpaks for some reason, and now it's all fixed! As for why the other things aren't their repo versions, quite honestly I'm just lazy, I've been on a Steam Deck for the past 4-5 years and just last week I got a proper PC after a decade, so I was just using what I was already familiar with, that being flatpaks. For the GL drivers tho... Honestly, no clue, I didn't manually install them, so I guess they just came in through the archinstall script.

V1del · 2026-05-05 18:24:18

Flatpak maintains their own binary versions that need to match the host libraries to properly interface with the kernel drivers. When the host version of drivers updates so must the flatpaks.

If you consider this solved please mark it as such by editing the thread title and prepending [SOLVED] or so in the first post, might have to shorten it a bit though.

Last edited by V1del (2026-05-05 18:25:17)

Arch Linux

#1 2026-05-05 12:42:20