Hi all, I’d like some help with setting up Linux for gaming, I’m not a new user but I’m not expert either, I’ve been having problems with my current setup, before I had Bazzite 42 which worked perfectly, however I was afraid things would eventually break over with that layering thing, since I use some things like Pale Moon which has a dependency that needs to be layered (IIRC it was libdbus), MEGAsync, ZeroTier and Kvantum, all of which have to be installed to the system, so I switched to openSUSE TW (both distros using KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland session), which was been working excellently so far… well, except for one thing:
For some backstory and context (you can skip this paragraph): the computer I’ve been running these distros on is a GIGABYTE G5 MF with 16GB of RAM, which I bought back on May/2024 and it had winblows 11 Home, it was my fault not knowing I should’ve chosen a laptop with AMD hardware instead (I don’t exclusively use it for gaming and sometimes travel with it but that’s besides the point), but it’s served as a lesson for next time and winblows was used for some time after tweaking it… until I had enough of it, because even with the patches people make to reduce telemetry, the way it’s now just doesn’t feel at home and any more trustworthy than 7 or XP both of which I’ve grown up with, so I’ve been hoping to have this laptop run any Linux distro, so long as I can game in it.
Anyway, the G5 MF ships with a big troublemaker Made in Nvidia™, it’s has an RTX 4050, and in it I play a variety of things on and off my Steam library, but at least one game has been giving me serious problems every time I hit almost an hour after playing ever since I switched to openSUSE: Wuthering Waves (or WuWa for short), it lags gradually - it starts fine for a couple of minutes where it runs fluently before the lag kicks in and becomes worse and worse the more I play (on occasions it even hangs the system so I have to force a restart), although while the lag is there, it seems to happen primarily when I try to move the mouse regardless of the situation (if I’m in dialogue or exploring, but it’s the worst when fighting), and during cutscenes where they always play slowly and voices go out of sync.
I tried everything I could think of as well, changing settings in game as well as launch options, DirectX version (11 or 12), and Proton forks, but the gradual lag still persists (this didn’t happen in Bazzite).
Currently, these are my launch options for the game:
STEAMOS=1 STEAMDECK=1 PROTON_USE_NTSYNC=1 WINE_GSTREAMER=1 VK_DRIVER_FILES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/nvidia_icd.x86_64.json PROTON_DLSS_UPGRADE=1 PROTON_NVIDIA_LIBS_NO_32BIT=1 prime-run gamemoderun %command% -dx12.
I found via ProtonDB (which I’ve been using to get different launch options from fellow Nvidia users) that adding that VK_DRIVER_FILES variable lets me run the game on the dGPU, otherwise it refuses to and runs on integrated, this wasn’t required when I had Bazzite.
Another problem this laptop has is that [Secure Boot] is always active and I don’t know how to disable it (mainly because there doesn’t seem to be a way and I didn’t find any info) otherwise I’d have long done it, also, my understanding about it is vague so I’m afraid of touching anything and bricking the machine, but I’m not looking to replace the machine yet since it still works great.
About [Secure Boot], here’s the related settings I found in the BIOS settings, but I forgot one more option and it’s like a boot list with two entries about openSUSE, one has “secureboot” on the name and the other doesn’t, if it helps I’ll add a picture of it to that album.
Worse, I don’t have many distros I can pick from, as they must include support for [Secure Boot] out of the box so I can boot into the OS.
The drivers are installed and should be signed though since the game is offloaded every time I run it, here’s some more info from commands I thought I’d add.
So here’s the options I’m pursuing:
- Stay on openSUSE, if there’s any fix to the gradual lagging.
- Switch to another distro while also trying XFCE on X11, I’d love to use Ksnip for my screenshotting needs while I’m at it, but Wayland is annoying with the portal thing because Ksnip isn’t native and that’s like the only thing I hate about Wayland from experience, so Spectacle is the closest best alternative for me wherever I end up stuck with Wayland and I’m satisfied with it. I’m kinda thinking about Fedora but I’m concerned about the possible use of AI even with their proposals/rules. Otherwise I’ve read XFCE is lightweight so it could maybe help?
- Just go back to Bazzite: perhaps the most suitable choice despite being based on Fedora, but if it works the best for my use case, then I guess I’ll have to keep it as my daily driver.
Any other ideas on what I could try would be appreciated as well (so long as it’s not coming back to winblows), or just possible fixes so I don’t have to do distro hopping would be great, and if any info is missing I’d be glad to add it, just let me know what I should run on the command line, thanks for any help in advance.
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With OpenSUSE are you using the open source nvidia driver, or did you add the nvidia hosted repo and install their proprietary drivers?
The nvidia owned repo did work better for me.
But could be memory leak.
For anyone with laptop, and onboard graphics and nvidia RTX I had to install an opensuse swicher package to ensure appa start on the right GPU (right click option on the app) I forget the app name at the moment, it wanst the bumblebee or optimus, it was something else, Switcheroo maybe.
I’m using the propietary driver, latest stable release as of now which is 580.105.08, I thought it could be a memory leak as well, maybe I should’ve tried if it happens with other demanding games like this, bur once I could learn how to disable [Secure Boot] it seemed like WuWa remained running above 60FPS consistently (maybe it was blocking something that wasn’t signed but I’m not sure).
You must be talking about SUSEPrime, I have it up and running, it provides the
prime-runI use to launch the game. I remember trying to set up the dGPU when I had Debian a couple months ago, and it didn’t go well (Bumblebee was among the stuff I tried), my games weren’t off-loading unless they had a native Linux version, like ETS2.Could be signing, if removing secure boot changed behaviour. The proprietary nvidia kernal module needs you to enroll the key in MOK interface at boot after an install or some updates.
You should have gotten a blue screen at boot that said options like, continue or enroll MOK, delete MOK, cancel, etc.
After I left Bazzite i switched to Garuda, which is also gaming and performance focused. I also chose the xfce option, which has been great.
If your are considering switching, give Garuda a look. I’m also on a gigabyte board with an Nvidia card.
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll give it a shot on a virtual machine and I might switch to that or CachyOS, not sure what I’ll do, but for now things are working again here on openSUSE, but it’s good to know Garuda works for you.
I know it’s late advice, since you already switched from Bazzite, but I’ve never understood why people have an aversion to adding a layered package to the immutable system.
My attitude has always been: If an update breaks something, the whole point is that I can roll back. I’ve been running Fedora Silverblue with many layered packages for several years, and the worst thing that ever happened was when I had to delay a system update by a few hours because the latest build of a layered package hadn’t hit the repos yet.
Plus, for anything like development work that requires build dependencies, I spin up a toolbox to compile it. The nice thing about the default toolbox is that it’s a base Fedora install, so all the system libs are compatible with my host machine. I’ve found it’s often simple to compile a project in the toolbox and then launch the executable from my host system without adding any new layered packages to it.
It feels like Bazzite tells you a million times over that you absolutely should not layer packages, it scared me off for sure since I’m new to immutable systems and don’t really know how they work fully.
Ah… maybe for me it’s because I didn’t get much experience with distros that work like that, I didn’t want to mess up things and ignore the warnings they set up on the wiki, before having this laptop I had some familiarity with Linux, but for well over a year it’s been mostly running winblows, and a lot of things changed on Linux, so distros that work with layering were a new thing to me.
But for now I’m good on openSUSE after fixing (?) the problem by managing to disable [Secure Boot] with help of the others here, I’ve gotten a few suggestions on distros to try out on virtual machines so I might end up switching if I feel like doing more testing, but for now I’m happy here. Bazzite still remains as an option so I’ll get it back if I need it.
Although seem to have solved your main issue, I have a few comments on your Steam Run command.
For one, I think
VK_DRIVER_FILES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/nvidia_icd.x86_64.jsonand yourprime-runcommand are redundant - both of those will do the same thing. Personally, I use neither of those and instead do something likeDRI_PRIME=1 %command%(obviously not this exactly always, as there might be other flags, but roughly the idea).In general, I’d just recommend seeing which of these command flags you really need, because I see people in ProtonDB getting away with much simpler launch commands.
I’ve been trying different launch options posted there just to get the game running, once I’m home in a few hours I’ll try only
DRI_PRIME=1and reply after I’m done, but for some reasonprime-rundid nothing on its own, adding that other variable with the path made the game offload, but that was when I had [Secure Boot] enabled, so things might work now with these changes, we’ll see…Depending on how your system is set up, DRI_PRIME might use a different number. Generally, you check with
glxinfo.
it seems to happen primarily when I try to move the mouse regardless of the situation (if I’m in dialogue or exploring, but it’s the worst when fighting), and during cutscenes where they always play slowly and voices go out of sync
There was an issue with the Steam overlay that happened when they added the screen recording feature. After about 25 minutes any input will cause a delay in rendering the current frame.
You can disable the overlay or add LD_PRELOAD=“” to your launch options, if this is the problem
Spectacle
Flameshot is pretty good too
About [Secure Boot], here’s the related settings I found in the BIOS settings, but I forgot one more option and it’s like a boot list with two entries about openSUSE, one has “secureboot” on the name and the other doesn’t, if it helps I’ll add a picture of it to that album.
Try booting with the non-secure boot option then
cat /sys/firmware/ipl/secure1 means secure boot is enabled, 0 means disabled.
If it’s 0 then you could use any distro, regardless of secure boot support.
LD_PRELOAD=""did work but I was hoping I’d be able to keep the Steam Overlay for its screenshot utility (I use it a lot), but it appears to be fixed now thanks to the others’ suggestions here, after finding how [Secure Boot] is disabled.That file doesn’t seem to exist (in fact the
ipldirectory isn’t even there), but probably because I managed to make that change, the game seems to be working normally as I said in another reply as it’s running consistently above 60FPS, I’d like to test one of these days again before marking my question as solved (taking more screenshots and playing with less idling).Otherwise here’s a screenshot of a test without
LD_PRELOAD=""after a little over 2 hours of having the game open.Thanks anyway!
Disabling Secure Boot fixed it? That is very interesting.
Glad you got it solved! :)
Very first thing: see if the Nvidia driver is actually loading properly by running
nvidia-smiand see what it says.You may have the Nouveau driver loaded instead, which you can check with:
lsmod | grep nouvThanks, I actually ran
nvidia-smion multiple occasions, I did while I was figuring out the launch options to put in WuWa and ensure it’s being offloaded.But here’s the output of these commands right now while the game is running with Mangohud to show FPS, thanks to help from others here, I was able to work it out by disabling [Secure Boot] but I’ll test some more when I can to ensure it’s all working and mark as solved.
I had the propietary driver set up with help of the openSUSE wiki here.
👍
To disable secure boot u have to put supervisor password in uefi, set to any u like 1234 otherwise this option on laptops often locked without password,then disable it
Then install any disto u like,I am using cachyos(arch based) but it’s up to u what to use
Also are u sure game using not integrated gpu? And use nvidia
Thank you! I didn’t realize that could work (I had to disable the enforcement option and that made [Secure Boot] turn off as well), interestingly it made the [Hybernate] option pop out in the start menu on Plasma, I think I’ll try a bit more on openSUSE before deciding if another distro could be what I need but the gradual lag seems to be a Steam Overlay issue, otherwise I happened to be testing CachyOS with XFCE on a virtual machine and I really liked it.
And yeah, I check with
nvidia-smiand there’s also noticeably different performance if the game is offloaded or runs on integrated, its EXE shows up on the output when it’s offloaded.
Hello from the owner of a 2018 Gigabyte Aero 15Wv8! Neat to see these less common Gigabyte laptops being used with Linux.
That UEFI looks a lot newer than the one on my machine, so I am not 100% sure, but I would assume disabling “enforce secure boot” would be the same as disabling secure boot. Other folks may know more, but I cannot think of any reason why turning it off would brick your Linux install.
As for XFCE vs KDE, I would say stick with KDE/Wayland unless you can really not find any workaround. The difference in resource usage between DEs is probably not significant enough that it would make a difference on a machine with 16GB of RAM and a relatively recent CPU. I mostly see that advice given for older machines with very little RAM.
I’m not sure about that game or the gradual lag issue. A quick google shows someone describing a similar-sounding issue in this Linux Mint forum thread, though. Maybe some of the suggestions there might help? They mention some stuff around
LD_PRELOAD=with various parameters in Proton.Hi, that’s nice!
But sorry for the delay, I needed some more time to test, I did try
LD_PRELOAD=""but I was hoping I wouldn’t need it since I prefer Steam’s screenshot tool from their Overlay, as I can quickly take screenshots in a row and quickly view them without leaving the game.I’d prefer Plasma as well although trying other DEs would be a nice experience, but I was able to disable the [Enforce Secure Boot] that also disabled [Secure Boot] in itself (interestingly it made the [Hybernate] option appear in the start menu on Plasma) after testing anon5621’s suggestion, then I left the game mostly idling for a little over 2 hours without
LD_PRELOAD=""while I had some things to do, played a bit, and the gradual lag didn’t happen at all (the game was consistently above 60FPS), I tried bringing in and out the overlay a few times but nothing, I might need to do more testing like maybe take more screenshots when I plan to play WuWa or something else for longer one of these days, but I’m pretty sure I idle’d before with the game open and it lagged later anyways (before disabling [Secure Boot], that is) and now it’s not…At any rate, thanks for the suggestions, here’s a screenshot of the game with Mangohud overlay after that +2h test.
