Gnome 3.38 hangs & stutters with Nvidia drivers
I'm not sure if I'm posting this in the proper category, but here it goes coped and pasted from r/Gnome or Reddit:
Recently after upgrading to Gnome 3.38, I've noticed plenty of problems while the Nvidia drivers are installed.
At first, the system used to totally freeze while working with multiple windows & workspaces or while browsing the web. I'm aware of the current nvidia problem with Linux 5.9 kernel, so I moved back to 5.4 LTS. This solved the freezing problem but not Gnome's stuttering behavior.
I tested my system on Gnome 3.36 and everything runs smoothly. I'm aware there are changes being made to mutter/shell recently, so probably this has something to do with it. Removing the Nvidia driver also solves the problem.
What actually happens is very annoying while using the terminal for example. It's like frames that are supposed to be rendered to the screen are kept inside the buffer and not synced properly, so while executing commands on the terminal, or maybe writing a document, browsing through the file manager, information seems to be late and is outputted to the screen sometimes even 20 seconds later.
Sometimes the screen will become unresponsive because there is already too much information waiting to be displayed so applications begin to hang.
I've been using Gnome for the past 5 years and never experienced such an annoying thing. Now I must either run the open source Nvidia driver ( nouveau ) or switch to other DE if i want to have official Nvidia driver support.
I tested other desktop environments, including Gnome 3.36 and there is no problem at all, so this is only exclusive to 3.38 on X11 with Nvidia on some systems.
Is anyone else experiencing these things?
UPDATE1: This is what gnome-shell log shows when the problem occurs:
gnome-shell[879]: Window manager warning: MetaSyncRing: Sync object is not ready -- were events handled properly?
gnome-shell[879]: Window manager warning: MetaSyncRing: Too many reboots -- disabling
UPDATE2: Forced Wayland session instead of X11 with the proprietary nvidia driver. The issue is no longer present, however some applications do not work of course.