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:

1. Stay on openSUSE, if there’s any fix to the gradual lagging.
2. 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?
3. 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.