The Monitors That Windows Stole

04:26 - Rebooted from Windows back into openSUSE. Two of my three monitors are gone.

xrandr --output HDMI-1 --auto --right-of eDP-1
warning: output HDMI-1 not found; ignoring

The outputs don’t exist. Not disabled. Not detected at all.

21:15 - RTX 4070 Ti with the NVIDIA proprietary driver. Worked yesterday. Windows didn’t change anything. Or did it?

21:20 - Checked the driver situation:

lsmod | grep nvidia

Nothing loaded. The NVIDIA driver isn’t running.

21:26 - Found it in dmesg:

NVRM: The NVIDIA GPU 0000:01:00.0 (PCI ID: 10de:2782)
NVRM: installed in this system is not supported by
NVRM: NVIDIA 390.157 driver release.

Wait. 390.157? That’s an ancient legacy driver from 2022. My RTX 4070 Ti needs driver 525 or newer. How did I end up with the wrong driver?

21:32 - Removed the old driver:

sudo zypper remove 'nvidia*'

Installed the correct one:

sudo zypper install nvidia-video-G06 nvidia-gl-G06 nvidia-compute-G06 nvidia-compute-utils-G06

Rebooted.

21:45 - Still broken.

nvidia-smi
NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver.

21:58 - Checked what was actually installed:

rpm -qa | grep nvidia
lsmod | grep nvidia

Userspace packages are there (580.95.05). But lsmod returns nothing. The kernel module isn’t loading because it isn’t there.

The missing package: nvidia-video-G06-kmp-default - the kernel module.

sudo zypper install nvidia-video-G06-kmp-default
sudo reboot

22:15 - Three monitors. All working.

What Happened:

Something changed during the Windows boot cycle - maybe a firmware update, maybe just GPU state weirdness
The old NVIDIA 390 driver was installed at some point (maybe from a different repo or during initial setup) and was silently failing
After cleaning that up, I installed the userspace components but forgot the kernel module

The Lesson: On openSUSE, the NVIDIA kernel module is a separate package (nvidia-video-G06-kmp-default). Installing nvidia-video-G06 gives you the userspace bits. You need both. And dual-booting with Windows can definitely mess with GPU initialization.

lsmod | grep nvidia returning empty is the first sign the kernel module is missing.

Windows didn’t steal my monitors. It just reminded me that NVIDIA drivers on Linux are three separate packages that all need to be installed, and I’d only done two of them.