Ok so, I am not sure if it is a mere coincidence or not, but after being on linux for one year, Fedora on Gnome, few months ago I have decided to try KDE Plasma on Fedora. Needless to say it was a fresh installation, so no conversion from Gnome to KDE whatsoever. And meanwhile during one year of Gnome experience, almost never had any issues while playing videogames and keeping the same hardware, on KDE instead I am getting lots problems while gaming. It happens on both Steam and Heroic games, with different versions of proton (ProtonGE, CachyProton, Wine, etc.) but time to time, games frozes, black screen, and while sometimes the game keep going, other times I must brutally restart my PC.
For when the PC doesnβt need to restart straight away, I can see the notification window saying something like βKWIN message - A graphics reset event occurredβ or βthe desktop stopped workingβ. Now, I beg your pardon if I donβt have the exact messages, but if someone is willing to help me, we can dig together and nail down the source of the issue.
So, is it just me experiencing this type of problem, or instead KDE is definetely not a good environment to play videogames on linux? I hope to find a solution because overall I like KDE, but if it will prevent me playing videogames then I must return to Gnome. Thanks
Could be a number of things.
Being on Fedora myself, I have almost no issues. I have fought my Nvidia GPU a lot though, the primary being AMD, I was mostly fine (The Nvidia card has sine been replaced with an Intel one).
And thatβs my concerns and also why I was saying that maybe is just a coincidence or perhaps GPU drivers went bad, bugs on Kernels (even tho I have already tested out alsmost 10 versions) or what else who knows.
I am on AMD GPU, and as I have said previously, during Gnome I have probably had a crash like this once or twice maximum, but now is pretty much constantly, and I cannot keep going in this way. Or I can find a solution on whatβs going on in my computer/OS, or I will return back to Gnome where at least I was able to play properly (and if the crashes will happen there as well, then is going to be a different beast)
I use KDE in most places with AMD graphics and donβt see these issues. Though I donβt really game on the F44 device, Nobara is close to fedora, it uses/ships KDE. Mostly I use an arch derivative with KDE, SteamOS uses KDE for desktop mode. Iβm not minimising your problem. Thereβs some unusual combination, not that KDE is particularly unsuited.
Next time it hangs and you reboot, you can try journalctl -b -1
Which will load up the journal (log) of the minus 1th boot. This may have some clues in some of its last entries. (itβs also hardly the only thing that could be looked at)
As a household that Iβve converted 7 machines and consoles all over to Fedora + KDE Plasma - across AMD and Nvidia GPUs from R9700 to Vega64 and Nvidia 4070 to GTX Titals (OEM) - all for four very heavy and active gamers on Steam - I can say with assurance, itβs not KDE Plasma.
IME over the decades, itβs usually hardware or distro related. I converted the entire family over to Universal Blue images, Aurora and Bazzite.
And I gotta say, zero issues. The steering wheel, pedals, shifter, and ebrake all worked outta the box on Bazzite, once you went through some of the setup scripts post-install.
Note: Earlier in the year, or late last year, there was a KDE Plasma release when the forced over to Wayland - and it did not go well. Lots of CPU spikes and severe pauses on simple things like context menus. Still usable, bur not ideal and games suffered 50%.
Since Universal Blue is a rolling release, we got the fixes in about a month.
But itβs been long fixed since then.
Unless you were trying an old distro? Some are trying to hold onto X11, which is dead now and Plasma dropped support.
For the Kernel, the issue is happening even with the regular Fedora one.
The crashes are just random, and I havenβt touched my hardware since Iβve moved from Fedora Gnome to Fedora KDE, so apart what you have said about Wayland and KDE issues, I donβt know what else it could case the problems
How about booting an Universal Blue - Bazzite USB installer? Itβs basically a Live ISO.
Then browse with Firefox a bit. Maybe even install some Linux games from Bazarr (the app store) and see how stable it is, sitting on the USB stick for a while.
The only other thing it could be is the hardware combination needing some kernel override. But I have to say, we have some pretty wild hardware combinations here and i have never had to edit the grub cmdline for any of them.
Sorry for the late answer but I was actually waiting to see if and when my system would crash, and just now it happened. For while I thought the issue was resolved, since I have passed the last couple of days playing without any issues, but now it happened, while playing WoW Classic.
This is the exact moment when my system crashed, reported on the Journal:
Aug 31 22:24:02 FedoraKDE kernel: amdgpu 0000:28:00.0: Dumping IP State Aug 31 22:24:02 FedoraKDE kernel: amdgpu 0000:28:00.0: Dumping IP State Completed Aug 31 22:24:02 FedoraKDE kernel: amdgpu 0000:28:00.0: [drm] AMDGPU device coredump file has been created Aug 31 22:24:02 FedoraKDE kernel: amdgpu 0000:28:00.0: [drm] Check your /sys/class/drm/card1/device/devcoredump/data Aug 31 22:24:02 FedoraKDE kernel: amdgpu 0000:28:00.0: ring gfx_0.0.0 timeout, signaled seq=4256829, emitted seq=4256832 Aug 31 22:24:02 FedoraKDE kernel: amdgpu 0000:28:00.0: Process WoWClassic.exe pid 5582 thread vkd3d_queue pid 5717 Aug 31 22:24:02 FedoraKDE kernel: amdgpu 0000:28:00.0: Starting gfx_0.0.0 ring reset Aug 31 22:24:04 FedoraKDE kernel: amdgpu 0000:28:00.0: MES failed to respond to msg=RESET Aug 31 22:24:04 FedoraKDE kernel: amdgpu 0000:28:00.0: failed to reset legacy queue Aug 31 22:24:04 FedoraKDE kernel: amdgpu 0000:28:00.0: reset via MES failed and try pipe reset -110 Aug 31 22:24:04 FedoraKDE kernel: amdgpu 0000:28:00.0: The CPFW hasn't support pipe reset yet. Aug 31 22:24:04 FedoraKDE kernel: amdgpu 0000:28:00.0: Ring gfx_0.0.0 reset failed Aug 31 22:24:04 FedoraKDE kernel: amdgpu 0000:28:00.0: GPU reset begin!. Source: 1 Aug 31 22:24:06 FedoraKDE kernel: amdgpu 0000:28:00.0: MES failed to respond to msg=REMOVE_QUEUE Aug 31 22:24:06 FedoraKDE kernel: amdgpu 0000:28:00.0: failed to unmap legacy queue Aug 31 22:24:07 FedoraKDE kernel: [drm:gfx_v11_0_hw_fini [amdgpu]] *ERROR* failed to halt cp gfx
And then it goes and goes with other information I am not able to understand. So, it seems an issue with the GPU or the drivers, right? If so this is a bad news, even tho I donβt understand why this happens so randomly and without any patterns
If you create your own distro, it isnβt Fedora anymore. So you shouldnβt claim Fedora KDE has issues, say your Franken distro has issues
If you believe the Cachy hype, use Cachy. But the large and capable Fedora team put a lot of work in making it work reliably and they fix issues. If you go off script and change major components, you are on your own and are asking for problems.
What else did you change? I would try original Fedora and see if that works better. Or even better, try Bazzite or Auroras. Because they prevent you from βimprovingβ the OS with random Kernels
I am not claiming that Fedora KDE is causing this issue, I am just trying to figure out why is it happening and it started happening only when I switched to Fedora KDE. Now, it is true also that, previously, under Fedora Gnome, I had only Fedora Kernel and now I have both Fedora and Cachy, but as Iβve said before the same issue is happening on Fedora Kernel as well.
Is it because I have installed two different family of Kernels?
Is it because I have something compromised on my Hardware?
Is it because maybe some issue is happening on GPU Driver/Wayland side?
Thatβs what I am trying to figure out. Perhaps I will try the Linux distro live, even tho, as I have said, the issue is just happening randomly (after hours or even days). I would like to avoid and re-install linux from scratch, going to Nobara or Bazite to have a full dedicated gaming OS, if the issue will happen again on that case. I just want to be sure, thatβs it
Before you make Fedora be Fedora, I donβt see a point to chase other possible causes.
It is possible the cause is something entirely different. But you want to exclude all obvious causes
What did you expect from using a Cachy Kernel? That Kernel is optimized and updated to work in Cachy (Arch), not Fedora. You basically created your own distro. That is possible and how Linux works. But now you are responsible for your distro. Unless you have more resources and skill than the Fedora or Cachy team, I donβt see how that ends well.
The good thing about Linux is, the user can change anything. The bad thing about Linux is, the user can change anything.
Been using KDE Plasma on Gentoo for coming up on a year now, on my rig thatβs 99% for gaming. Havenβt had issues inherent to KDE Plasma.
Could be a wayland/xwayland issue, or some dependency missing or something maybe. The kernel shouldnβt effect it unless you compiled it without some function that kwin needs. I run a pretty stripped kernel (linux-tkg scripted, so incorporating patches from clear linux, cachyOS, etc, throwing the BORE scheduler on top, etc) and havenβt had that issue.
Are you running any overclocks on any of your hardware (RAM, CPU, GPU)? Do you know what version of Mesa youβre using (fastfetch should be able to pull this, you can run fastfetch -c all.jsonc to pull everything it can find (do NOT paste the full output here, it will spit out your IP, geolocation, a bunch of other stuff too).
From a quick google-fu, folks have had those sort of amdgpu issues when thereβs a mismatch with the mesa version. Iβm not sure how theyβre related as Iβve updated kernel and mesa drivers independent of each other with 0 issues forβ¦ however many versions itβs been since ~November last year when I built my system. A lot.
Iβll try and remember to pull the versions of everything Iβm running at home tonight.
