How to configure Kubuntu on a server which part time headless - 20.10

[shag00]

As you may be aware pulse audio and Nvidea have tag teamed to screw up reliable usage of a monitors. In my case I have a server which for the majority of time just serves and for a few a day I watch shows on it. The PC is connected to an amplifier via HDMI with pass through of the video to the TV. The TV is a UHD TV and supports resolution up to 4096 x 2160. Unsurprisingly, I desire a high resolution that results in unreadable windows generated by Kubuntu so I then turn to fractional scaling which makes the windows readable but ****s up just about everything else. I also use the Noveau driver as it works fine for watching shows. So with no Nvidea driver I am able to have pulse audio detect and connect to the correct sink and actually work every time/logon.

The problem arises when I wish to connect to the server in headless mode via KRDC. With the amplifier/TV turned off the server PC becomes extremely sluggish taking many seconds to open a window or pretty much do anything. Non graphical activity seems not to be effected, it will still dish out files with no noticeable (to me) degradation of performance. If the amp/TV is turned on everything works well. So the question is, is there a way to fix this problem.

[bobbicat]

I also have pulse audio and nvidia. I've been scouring the internet to see what I could find. My experience is that everything works okay in Kubuntu 2004 LTS. However, In Gorilla audio does not set up. So, for now I am using the LTS version, but I am also running Gorilla to watch for any developments.

I have discovered that the problem seems to be with the latest version of pipewire [pipewire 0.3.10-4] which is present in Gorilla. The version in Kubuntu 2004 [pipewire 0.2.7-1] does not have a problem as far as I can see.

The solution for the moment seems to be to disable or uninstall pipewire if you need to use the Gorilla version of Kubuntu, or alternatively install and run Kubuntu 2004 LTS.

Submitting a bug report to bring attention to this problem might move things along. I'm unsure where the best place to report would be. KDE does seem like a possibility, but their bug report area is complaining about a huge number of bugs, so getting attention there might be problematic. This application [pipewire] came from Red Hat, via deb, I think,

*addition*

After more searching I found pipewire on github, there have been quite a number of updates that could well correct the issues in Kubuntu. Perhaps it is more a question of bringing the repos in Kubuntu up to date. All this is very much outside my ability range.

https://github.com/PipeWire/pipewire/blob/master/NEWS

I think the main thing to note is that the version of pipewire in Gorilla is creating problems for some. The problem version is pipewire 0.3.10-4
It is possible that a more up to date version would correct things.

[shag00]

I think you are on the right track and Ubuntu is aware of it, see this work around https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...e/+bug/1897965 but Nvidia caused problems with the 460 version as well. After several attempts (numerous reinstalls) on 20.10 I now have sound and picture working as desired but now have the issue of slowness when working on the PC remotely. To me it's a case of priorities and the Ubuntu team need to prioritise the basics of picture and sound highly. I think by any measure the inability to firstly have an installer that works flawlessly every time and being able to match a movie on bundled software without error is pretty poor.