This was my experience with it too. Until I realized that the issue everything boils down to is having an old gfx. In particular an old nvidia gfx that has old, closed source driver compatibility only and can’t initialize vulkan. I’ve still stuck to it, it’s arch running on my desktop, because I’ll upgrade hw components eventually. 12 years with a gtx 670 has been quite enough.
I’ve installed fedora workstation 41 on a decommissioned work laptop last week, a 2021 model with an 5700U, and everything just works out of the box. Some obscure game that I’ve been trying to play on my desktop, not even platinum rated on protondb, launched on first attempt without any shenanigans using heroic launcher.
Nvidia, especially older models, are probably just simply not the way to go for gaming on linux.
The experience was horrible with nouveau. KDE Wayland kept crashing, so I’ve switched to Xorg & xfce4 in the beginning, which still kept producing artifacts. I’ve then dug into it and found out that some 47x driver is the one that is the most compatible with my card.
I’ve tried switching to nouveau once more a couple months later during a kernel update, and while I’ve managed to stop Xorg from producing artifacts on the screen, the performance on just xfce4 was horrible, something definitely sub-20 fps rendering rate. I’ve mucked around a lot with drivers and reboots at this time though.
That sucks. My GPU is only a couple years old though, it’s an RTX3070, and I tried using both open and closed source drivers to no avail. The one driver I finally found that worked, for whatever reason, was the v555 (still several versions back from current) server-version closed driver, but I still couldn’t play games.
This was my experience with it too. Until I realized that the issue everything boils down to is having an old gfx. In particular an old nvidia gfx that has old, closed source driver compatibility only and can’t initialize vulkan. I’ve still stuck to it, it’s arch running on my desktop, because I’ll upgrade hw components eventually. 12 years with a gtx 670 has been quite enough.
I’ve installed fedora workstation 41 on a decommissioned work laptop last week, a 2021 model with an 5700U, and everything just works out of the box. Some obscure game that I’ve been trying to play on my desktop, not even platinum rated on protondb, launched on first attempt without any shenanigans using heroic launcher.
Nvidia, especially older models, are probably just simply not the way to go for gaming on linux.
Try the open source nouveau driver for your older gfx card ive heard compatability is better for older cards
The experience was horrible with nouveau. KDE Wayland kept crashing, so I’ve switched to Xorg & xfce4 in the beginning, which still kept producing artifacts. I’ve then dug into it and found out that some 47x driver is the one that is the most compatible with my card.
I’ve tried switching to nouveau once more a couple months later during a kernel update, and while I’ve managed to stop Xorg from producing artifacts on the screen, the performance on just xfce4 was horrible, something definitely sub-20 fps rendering rate. I’ve mucked around a lot with drivers and reboots at this time though.
That sucks. My GPU is only a couple years old though, it’s an RTX3070, and I tried using both open and closed source drivers to no avail. The one driver I finally found that worked, for whatever reason, was the v555 (still several versions back from current) server-version closed driver, but I still couldn’t play games.
RTX3060, no issues for me after installing the driver
Yeah I’m pretty sure it was an issue with PopOS, not the GPU/drivers.