Installing proprietary nvidia driver messed up my display font globally

Greetings Fedora Folks <3
I’m just starting my Fedora journey, it’s only been three days and I’ve never been happier.

My laptop is old, and one might dare and say “ancient”. It has the good old GTX 460 QM. After a lot of repair and maintenance on the motherboard, the display was showing the wrong colors, and I thought it’s just the screen cable.
I was surprised to see the colors working just fine under Fedora 36 and wayland gnome. When my wayland sessions started to hang and freeze entirely without any key pressing response or whatsoever, I thought that it might be a GPU issue, so I installed the proprietary drivers.
Little did I know, it was my doom.
Whether it’s wayland or xorg, as long as I’m using the proprietary driver (390xx), the session will still crash and I’ll have to reboot. the crashing occurs under sub-ordinary activity in wayland, and under ordinary stress in xorg. The colors however, have returned to be faulty under proprietary drivers, and the font got messed up all over the system.

I removed everything related to nvidia, reinstalled nouveau stuff, reinstalled openbox, deleted its config files, edited every file related to system fonts anywhere I could, but the font is still messed up. I cannot express how much I am angry of nvidia’s careless actions well enough, so I’ll just pray to our lord and saviour in the cloud Linux Sebastian the tru(o)e vald(s)ian :stuck_out_tongue:

Here’s my system information, I hope I can get some help diagnosing and solving this issue. I scoured the internet and the only one who faced such thing haven’t actually explained how did he solve the matter.
[SOLVED] Fonts too small on X

Here are some system information:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family DRAM Controller (rev 09)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200/2nd Generation Core Processor Family PCI Express Root Port (rev 09)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 (rev 04)
00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 05)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev b5)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev b5)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev b5)
00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 6 (rev b5)
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 05)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation HM65 Express Chipset LPC Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 6 port Mobile SATA AHCI Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller (rev 05)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF106M [GeForce GTX 460M] (rev a1)
01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation GF106 High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1)
03:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)
04:00.0 USB controller: Fresco Logic FL1000G USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 04)
05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 06)
             .',;::::;,'.                 user@fedora
         .';:cccccccccccc:;,.             ------------
      .;cccccccccccccccccccccc;.          OS: Fedora Linux 36 (Workstation Edition) x86_64
    .:cccccccccccccccccccccccccc:.        Host: G53SW 1.0
  .;ccccccccccccc;.:dddl:.;ccccccc;.      Kernel: 5.17.5-300.fc36.x86_64
 .:ccccccccccccc;OWMKOOXMWd;ccccccc:.     Uptime: 6 hours, 11 mins
.:ccccccccccccc;KMMc;cc;xMMc;ccccccc:.    Packages: 2004 (rpm)
,cccccccccccccc;MMM.;cc;;WW:;cccccccc,    Shell: bash 5.1.16
:cccccccccccccc;MMM.;cccccccccccccccc:    Resolution: 1366x768 @ 120Hz
:ccccccc;oxOOOo;MMM000k.;cccccccccccc:    DE: LXQt
cccccc;0MMKxdd:;MMMkddc.;cccccccccccc;    WM: Mutter (X11)
ccccc;XMO';cccc;MMM.;cccccccccccccccc'    WM Theme: Adwaita-dark
ccccc;MMo;ccccc;MMW.;ccccccccccccccc;     Theme: Adwaita [QT], Adwaita-dark [GTK2/3]
ccccc;0MNc.ccc.xMMd;ccccccccccccccc;      Icons: breeze-dark [QT], breeze-dark [GTK2/3/4]
cccccc;dNMWXXXWM0:;cccccccccccccc:,       Font: Liberation Sans (12pt) [QT], Liberation Sans (12pt) [GTK2/3], System San Francisco Dis]
cccccccc;.:odl:.;cccccccccccccc:,.        Cursor: breeze (30px)
ccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc:'.          Terminal: gnome-terminal-server
:ccccccccccccccccccccccc:;,..             Terminal Font: Hurmit Nerd Font Mono Medium (12pt)
 ':cccccccccccccccc::;,.                  CPU: Intel Core i7-2630QM (8) @ 2.9GHz
                                          GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 460M
                                          Memory: 1846MiB / 7919MiB (23%)
                                          Disk (/): 7.7 GB / 435GiB (1%)
                                          Disk (/home): 692 GB / 772GiB (89%)
                                          Battery: 96%
                                          Locale: en_US.UTF-8

                                          ████████████████████████
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Note 1: I know that whatever happened, it happened in my /home. Because even formatting the root and reinstalling the system did not work for me.

Note 2: I don’t think that formatting /home is possible for me right now.

Note 3: I would like to know what difference did installing nvidia-390xx driver do to my files and revert it.

Thanks everyone
Kind Regards <3

some screenshots

Notice how the title bar is the only thing corrupt here

Look how they massacred my baby :smiling_face_with_tear:

One thing that just came to my mind is:
Live fedora doesn’t have the same issue in my installed system. So I will compare every single config file that can possibly cause such an issue, and then replace the faulty ones.

I will keep this forum as a journal for my progress

I tried replacing .config and .local then did a fresh install.
Nothing new so far.
But I’m aware that it’s an issue in X server/org.
I’ll dig further into this

I think something might have happened to my GPU itself or the pins/paths that connect to it from the mainboard.
Ironically though, staying on wayland does not re-exhibit the issue, but that sadly means that wayland doesn’t deal with legacy GPUs well enough, and that it’s time to send this old notebook to a scrapyard.
Thanks to anyone who took an interest and read this post, I am closing it now.