A Stable Fedora Checkpoint on a Hybrid-GPU Laptop

Two concrete faults behind a slow shutdown and a vanishing monitor (an NVIDIA daemon and a stale display layout), fixed and frozen at a known-good kernel.

2026-09-16

work: Sep 2026 · Stable checkpoint · Linux, Fedora, NVIDIA, Workstation

The machine

ASUS ROG Zephyrus G15: Ryzen 9 5900HS (AMD iGPU) + RTX 3070 Laptop, 40 GB RAM, Fedora Workstation (GNOME/Wayland), docked to two monitors (240 Hz primary, 165 Hz portrait) via an HP USB-C G5 dock. It's my admin, attack and dev workstation, so it has to be boring.

Symptoms

Reboots and shutdowns hanging for minutes
The second monitor missing after some reboots and resumes
An NVIDIA driver/kernel update that made things worse, including a temporary fall back to nouveau

Fault 1 — the immortal processes

The shutdown journal showed nvidia-settings refusing to exit even after SIGKILL, and nvidia-powerd timing out on normal stop, then on the watchdog, then surviving SIGKILL. nvidia-powerd also logged that the platform doesn't support its power tables, and the firmware had asked for Dynamic Boost DC control to be disabled.

nvidia-powerd exists only for Dynamic Boost. It isn't needed for graphics or external displays. The fix:

sudo systemctl disable --now nvidia-powerd
# suppress the system-wide autostart of nvidia-settings with a user override:
# ~/.config/autostart/nvidia-settings-user.desktop  →  Hidden=true

On the next shutdown, nvidia-powerd quit immediately.

Fault 2 — one monitor, two names

~/.config/monitors.xml held layouts where the same docked monitor appeared as both DP-2 and DP-3, depending on enumeration order through the dock. GNOME applied whichever stale layout matched and left the other screen dark. The fix was regenerating the display configuration, then testing in order: logout/login → reboot → reboot → suspend/resume → undock/redock.

The checkpoint

Final state: Fedora on kernel 7.2.4, GNOME/Wayland on the AMD iGPU, the RTX 3070 on NVIDIA 580.x for compute and games, no nvidia-powerd, and the dock and monitors stable. Then: freeze it. No kernel or driver updates without a rollback point.

Lessons

"Linux is flaky" is never a diagnosis. Read the shutdown journal: journalctl -b -1 -e.
Disable daemons for features your hardware doesn't support.
A workstation that runs the lab is infrastructure. Checkpoint it like infrastructure.

Sources: Zephyrus Display Detection Fix (14 Sep 2026), Diagnose Slow Startup Displays (16 Sep 2026), Choose Bazzite for Sysadmin Laptop (1 Sep 2026)