I'll just cut to the chase.
About 2-3 months ago I filed a bug report that overclocking on
Nvidia hardware wasn't working on Fedora. I observed this bug
while trying out Fedora Silverblue 30's release but not in beta. I
then later sent an email about this issue wherein Nvidia was
immediately blamed for the bug despite this not being an issue on
any other Linux distro. I was then asked to file a bug report and
had provider information, which I did by doing multiple reinstalls
of Silverblue/Workstation.
2-3 months ago by and the bug report has been closed because I didn't and couldn't do a deep level analysis. I don't use Fedora, I use Arch Linux. This isn't my distro and I'm not the one that broke it to begin with. The only reason I was even trying it out is because I really like the whole immutable filesystem concept and was hoping that the bug and issues with it would be ironed out and that I could switch to it if Arch decided to take a dump.
Sadly the issues weren't last time I checked about a month ago. Silverblue repos are often out of sync with the rest of Fedora resulting in upgrades failing. You have to manually cleanup upgrade meta cache to get upgrades to work correctly(rpm-ostree cleanup -m). Fedora update servers in general are unstable and unreliable as hell, sometimes returning HTTP error codes or just being offline. Gnome Software doesn't display software correctly on the front page. There still is no way to add Flatpak external disks via Gnome-Settings as of 3.34. You can't use Rawhide with Nvidia drivers because of debug kernel. There is a lack of software compared to other Linux distros like Ubuntu or Arch(no Vivaldi!?!?). Fedora developers tend to be hostile towards proprietary software. etc.
No, Red Hat. Fedora Silverblue isn't easy to use.
...but I digress...
I got the email and decided to check the nvidia-settings repo on Github[1]. Apparently, Someone has filed a bug report about overclocking on rootless X. org servers doesn't work[2]. I then downloaded Fedora Workstation and installed the Nvidia driver and checked which user the X. org server was running under.
Mini rant: By the way, update your damn installer images. Users
shouldn't have to install 400MB of updates after they just install
the distro. The installer image has Firefox 66 on it still! That's
really freaking stupid. On my 5400RPM drive it takes a half hour
to install all of that crap, which is longer than installing the
distro itself or updating under Silverblue!
Yep, X. Org **ISN"T** running under root. Overclocking doesn't work either, same as before.
So I then tried making X. Org run as root using the Arch Wiki's guide[3] and verified that I was now running as root.
I was... and overclocking is now working.
...seriously? You make a abrupt change to Fedora 30 literally
right before it was released, breaking overclocking applications
such as my own AND Nvidia's own software, and then blame Nvidia
for your own screwup? Really?
So problem found. It was a problem in Fedora all along, like I
said from nearly the beginning. Fix problems that **YOU** make
instead of blaming Nvidia next time.
[1] https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-settings/