E: please read the entire post before replying…

Hi all. For the last several years I’ve been using Bazzite/Gamescope on my desktop, and even before that I was using it with ChimeraOS. It’s been really great and I’ve enjoyed it thoroughly. Unfortunately I’ve begun to experience issues with games freezing. Within an hour of firing up a game, the image freezes. Audio continues playing on a loop. I’m able to pull up the menu and exit out of the game no problem. But then I fire it up and the same thing happens again.

I don’t really know how to diagnose this issue but I reinstalled Bazzite fresh, same issue. Installed CachyOS-Handheld, same issue. However I tried launching games from the desktop mode and I’ve now spent ~20 hours gaming with no issue, but this is certainly not ideal. Any ideas on potential fixes?

E: AMD 5700x + 6800XT 16GB

  • throwaway403@programming.dev
    3·
    5 hours ago

    Others have basically already pointed out how you should go about diagnosing the problem. Which, by itself, is already very valuable.

    Below, I will try to touch upon some tips and tricks that are worth noting in this context, assuming Bazzite*.

    • Pinning a specific deployment to return back to. As we’ll be doing some time traveling in a bit, it’s definitely recommended to pin your latest deployment (just in case) before you do anything else. See this entry in Bazzite’s documentation on that.
    • Rolling back to images from a certain day. So, IIRC, all of the uBlue products keep around 90 days worth of images you can rollback to. See Bazzite’s documentation on brh for more information. With this (and some effort), you can literally pinpoint the exact date from which you started to have problems with gamescope/game mode.
    • Looking into the exact changes between two deployments. So, after you’ve identified the last properly working deployment and the first deployment that started misbehaving, you can invoke the rpm-ostree db diff command to see what has changed between the two deployments. Note two things on this:
      • That the hashes coincide with the ones you actually want to compare.
      • The command catches only changes in packages. However, a config diff applied by Bazzite’s maintainers will not be shown here.
    • Asking help from community channels. You can even start here. But basically, a project’s discord/discourse is undoubtedly better equipped in helping you out. See this entry on Bazzite’s documentation for links.

    Wish ya good luck fam 😉!

    • artyom@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      2·
      5 hours ago

      Yeah, they have. The problem is that I don’t know understand anything they’re talking about. And I’m not interested in starting a new career. So I guess I should have known better.

      I already wiped Bazzite. But the only communities they support are Reddit, Github, and Discord. None of which I have any interest in participating in. The top pinned thread in their Discourse says no one looks at issues there, and to go to the corporate platforms for support.

      I appreciate the effort though.

      • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
        2·
        5 hours ago

        TL;DR

        Install an archival version of Bazzite or whatever else that corresponds to a date when you know it worked correctly.

        Bazzite in particular makes this fairly easy. They have straight forward instructions on how to roll back to a given version.

        If that fixes it, just use that version and don’t update.

        If you want to stick with Cachy, you can use the Arch Archive to downgrade your entire system to an earlier date, or just Gamescope.

      • throwaway403@programming.dev
        1·
        5 hours ago

        You can access those past images/snapshots even from a new install ;) .

        As it seems to have been some time since it started, I’d suggest trying out the oldest still accessible snapshot/image.