'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:Jump to 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
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New day, tried some new things, and still no success. From ensuring I'm in the correct UEFI mode with CSM and secure boot disabled, to wiping the USB clean, verifying the ISO hash, trying the non-NVIDIA version of bazzite, re-formatting multiple times with different settings, and trying all sorts of different things - nothing has been successful so far. I'm starting to lose hope in this project.
If anyone has any ideas or advice, please let me know.
I'm new to Bazzite so take this comment with an ocean of salt, but you say the hardware you're installing on is pretty old. I understood that if your nVidia card is older than GTX16xx gaming mode won't work, but you should be able to use the nvidia stable desktop and Steam Big Picture mode in that scenario.
If Bazzite is still attractive within those constraints, if it were me, I'd try making a new Bazzite install USB using Balena Etcher (I have had some recent issues with Rufus even though I used it for years) and start again from that.
You don't mention whether you've dedicated a whole drive to the installation, but that's the recommended installation scenario I believe.
Yup I agree with ru32day
* Try desktop mode if you have older hardware, you didn't mention what hardware you are using
* Sometimes Rufus does some strange things like setting the filesystem to NTFS which you don't want when booting Linux. Try Ventoy or Fedora Media Writer for making the bootable USB device.
The thing is, even rebasing it wouldn't allow steam to run; the installation seemed broken.
And yes, I dedicated a whole drive to the installation.
Desktop mode was not fully functional either, as steam was not working and even after installing it, it wouldn't launch.
And - my apologies about the hardware part. This machine is rocking 16 Gigs of RAM with a Ryzen 5 2600 and a NVIDIA GTX 1660 Super, on a Gigabyte motherboard.
That's really weird, the GTX 1660 should be fine even with gamemode
I figured it out yesterday late at night- the hardware wasn't the issue
I managed to get the proper version installed without rebasing. After a lot of pain, I came to the realization that the USB stick was failing, after seeing it cause IO errors on my Ubuntu laptop while I was trying to re-format it to try again. I confirmed it was faulty after running a testing program on it on windows; so I chucked it
I didn't have another USB stick to use and I was kind of impatient, so I did the most cursed thing in terms of PC hardware I've done in my life - I pulled out the hard drive from an old PS3 that I don't use anymore, and I basically used that as a bootable drive to install Bazzite from. And it worked
Now my new issue is the deck UI game mode or whatever its official name is having very low FPS. I'm not even playing a game - the steam UI itself is just laggy.
No such issue in desktop mode, though
From some research online I saw that switching to x11 would possibly fix the lag in the menu, but I cannot figure out how to actually switch to that. I read that you have to log out and select it in the login screen, but every time I try to log out on desktop mode, it just puts me back into game mode.
X11 isn't a thing anymore, wayland works pretty well on Linux even with Nvidia these days
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
That seemed to work, thanks. Although I found an alternative solution of setting the resolution of game mode really low, and that makes it not perfect, but manageable. I prefer that, to avoid the broken steam menus. Although I'm not sure whether that resolution is also applied to games or if it's only on steam - I'll have to test it out