I am going to guess that kwin as of 5.11 is defaulting to wayland and due to nvidia not supporting wayland properly, you get the nvidia black screen.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Streams-vs-GBM-Toolkits
Gnome does shimy nvidia to work with wayland, but KDE doesn't have the resources to deal with nvidia's unwanted fork of wayland support.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Mutter-Mainline-EGLStream
Here is some sources of the 5.11 changes:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Plasma-5.11
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Plasma-5.12-Wayland-Release
Try:
Clean cache to resolve upgrade problems
The problem may be caused by old cache. Sometimes after an upgrade, the old cache might introduce strange, hard to debug behaviour such as unkillable shells, hangs when changing various settings and several other problems such as ark being unable to unrar or unzip or amarok not recognizing any of your music. This solution can also resolve problems with KDE and Qt programmes looking bad following upgrade.
Rebuild your cache with the following commands:
$ rm ~/.config/Trolltech.conf
$ kbuildsycoca5 --noincremental
From: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/KDE#Clean_cache_to_resolve_upgrade_problems
And also:
Graphical related problems
Plasma keeps crashing with legacy Nvidia
This is caused by a bug in Plasma when using the Nvidia-304xx driver. Rather than disabling compositing, create a file kwin.sh in ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/ with the following contents:
#!/bin/sh
export KWIN_EXPLICIT_SYNC=0
Then go to System Settings > Startup and Shutdown > Autostart and Check/Add the script as a pre-KDE startup file.
From: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/KDE#Plasma_keeps_crashing_with_legacy_Nvidia
Xywa of Gentoo had a similiar problem with nvidia. Maybe that will help?
Ladies and Gentelman,
After 4 months nearly at the end, ONE more things to resolve - but Plasma 5 works finally with Optimus (on 1 account only), but I need your help with last problem (bellow).
Bellow are also my tips (apart from previous posts) for other users struggling with Optimus and what I did:
[1] Try it on new user account:
There was a clue on Arch forum called "Clean cache (KDE) to resolve upgrade problems".
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/KDE#Clean_cache_to_resolve_upgrade_problems
- As I described in post above, in main account, after "startx" I could see only KDE login screen for few seconds, and then infamous black screen.
- Also in previous post I said, that with new account, I could finally start KDE, but I did not see mouse-pointer. In reality, the mouse-pointer was on the righ edge of the screen, looks like there was another "virtual" screen, next to right-side of my laptop screen. I could see it for a moment on the edge (when I was moving a mouse), and sometimes I could even move a window from this area outside a laptop screen into a screen.
[2] Check user groups
- So I decide to make a video, as explanation above looks bit complicated, so I decided for video purpose to create another new user (by 'useradd') just for video purpose. After that I could not a start KDE, so I though maybe I need to check the groups. So I added this user after 'useradd' to such new groups: wheel, audio, video, cdrw, users, portage, polkitd, gamestat. After 'startx' I had... !!!working KDE Plasma5 with Optimus!!! Tested with games on Steam
source: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1042882-start-0.html