'Game Mode' Performance Issues
EDIT: My initial issue with installation has been resolved. Turns out my USB stick was faulty. Boring, I know - but installing from another device presented no issues.
Let me preface this by saying that I am quite the newbie when it comes to Linux and Linux Distros - I only have Ubuntu on my laptop for basic use. I kindly ask that you excuse any oversights or things that I may have missed that would've otherwise been obvious to someone else.
I recently bought a new computer, and I want to repurpose my old one and turn it into a living room gaming machine. The hardware is quite dated, so I figured this was a perfect opportunity to ditch Windows and instead try Bazzite, to hopefully get some more performance out of the machine. However, I would not have expected to run into so many issues and hurdles in installing the OS.
I initially used Rufus to create a bootable stick using the "bazzite-deck-nvidia-stable-amd64" ISO downloaded from the website, but trying to install it kept resulting in a Kernel Panic error, stating that it was "unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)" (1st image attached, pulled off reddit).
After some research, I found a possible solution from a user on reddit who seemingly had the same issue, that being to install Fedora and rebase it to Bazzite. I tried that, and the OS installed, but everything about it seemed problematic:
Steam refused to launch (apparently it wasn't even installed, even though the icon was on the taskbar?), the OS kept booting into a desktop environment by default, and "Return to game mode" was only rebooting the PC and bringing me back to the desktop. I tried some more things, like manually installing Gaming Mode, attempting to enable autologin + gaming mode session, messing with systemd, and tons more, and nothing seemed to work.
I gave up for the night out of frustration. My last resort was joining this discord and seeking advice. Should I keep pursuing this Fedora rebase approach, and if so, what should I do to 'repair' the installation and actually have it functional? If not, what should I do to get an actually functional ISO/bootable USB stick to directly install Bazzite from?
Thank you in advance.
Solution
That's a known issue with a work around https://docs.bazzite.gg/General/issues_and_resolutions/#steam-big-picture-mode-is-slow the big picture mode fix also fixes gamemode lag. It has a drawback that sometimes the steam menus break
