On your gf's system, is hardware acceleration configured correctly?
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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Heading home soon, will check it. Thanks
I'll need to dig deeper, but she is guarding her pc like a mother lion guarding a cub. I ran the commands - vainfo, vdpauinfo, and vulkaninfo | grep VK_KHR_video_ only vulkaninfo kicked back what it should have. I tried the same commands on my system with the same results and we are using the proprietary Nvidia driver NVIDIA driver (open kernel) metapackage 580 (proprietary, tested) only on her system it doesn't say "device using recomended driver" so I need to find the recommended one for her but she is in the middle of minecraft and youtube and doesn't want to reboot now, hopefully sat I can when she is at work
You said this happens during Elder Scrolls Online, right? Maybe have her close the game’s launcher while the game is running. In my case, I noticed jittery performance in everything, including moving the cursor, until I closed the launcher. May or may not be the issue, but it does sound similar to what happens to me when I leave that game’s launcher open.
She does close it as even on windows she found it made the system laggy, and it appears hardware acceleration is on in firefox but I think the snap is installed (thought I installed the flatpak same install on my system), every setting is the same as mine.
Damn, I really wish I could offer more help beyond ensuring drivers are set up correctly for NVIDIA. I mean, you could also check the power profile too, using something like cpupower-gui to see if it’s in power saving mode. I suppose you could also close other applications to see if one of them is interfering, since you said Firefox may have something to do with it. I suppose it’s possible Snap has something to do with it too.
and my gf a few weeks ago
Most people loose their gf when switching to Linux. So congratz on your new gf too. :D
I was smart(mostly), tested everything on other systems, my laptop has a similar gpu, and left her an escape valve by buying a new m.2 and putting the old one in storage.
We been together 20 yrs, she trusts me. Maybe she turns into a stocking wearing cat-girl... hehe
I do this too btw, when installing new os I always put the old drive out as a backup. You could make a present with cat girl ears xD wish you good luck. And btw also good luck on Linux.
Right now it is ESO and nothing else, when she tries the whole system lags until she can move the mouse painfully slowly to the browsers X.
Maybe you should consider using gamescope? This is what the steam deck uses internally to isolate games so that they fight with the window manager less often.
On KDE Kubuntu, you should have no problem installing it if you've installed steam as a .deb from the website. Basically, install it either from source or repo (whichever is recommended for ubuntu) and then modify your steam game settings to something akin to the following:
gamescope -f -- %command%
This will launch the game in an isolated WM so that it interferes less with your existing window manager. There's a tonne of settings, so gamescope --help might give you more details.
Steam is apparently working on making this easier to access by supplying it with all steam installations in the future, IIRC, but work there isn't finished yet.
Oh nice, just read the page. I haven't installed steam on her system yet as she doesn't need it, she is running through lutris and this looks like it will work. I will definitely test this on sat when she isn't home, thanks
Let me know how it goes.
Another feature that might be useful in the arsenal is that you can purposely downclock the refresh rate of the gamescope session when the window is out-of-focus, which means you can put less burden on the computer when multi tasking. Obviously the game will run at a lower frame rate when focus is away, but this might be OK if you want to free up more system resources for watching videos.
But like the other use said, a good place to start is making sure hardware accel is on within Firefox (or whatever browser you're using.)
Once gamescope even helped me recognizing my gamepad for a very specific game on Steam, which otherwise just didn't want to. I think you can use gamescope without Steam too.
yeah probably hardware accelration on the browser. could also be the DE/WM you're using on it.
What desktop environment and/or window manager is she using on the laptop?
We are both running Kubuntu 24.04 with kde desktop. Oh, she can run minecraft and watch yt no problem. ESO is through lutris
yeah try turning off the hardware accelration on the browser...which browser btw?
if the hardware accelration doesn't work check the Lutris forums and/or discord to see if anyone has come across the issue. Have you tried running ESO via steam at all? potentially could also check it via protondb.com if you try to run it via steam.
Generally though there should be scripts with Lutris to install it correctly. But i'd still check with the Lutris forum/discord (they're really nice and helpful dudes) if the browser thing doesn't work.
it is Firefox(snap), she only has her account with the official site, not the steam version, I did find that wonderful script for ESO in lutris. I was just suggested gamescope to look at as well
Don't run snaps. Download the .appimage/tarball of firefox and/or chrome .deb file, and try with that. The snap packages have weird restrictions that could create problems with other apps. Another thing to try is try another DE that allows more than 1 hw accelerated app at a time, the fastest to install and without conflicting with your kde, is xfce (use X11).
Yeah, I am finding I like snaps less and less, tho I do like the sandbox aspect (her grandson will be using this system from time to time so I feel some sand boxing would be appropriate). will I need to manually update her ff if its an appimage? The only appimage I am using right now is WLX overlay and other than "everything is there" I don't recall if it will update itself.
No, it won't update itself. This is just to try if the problem improves.
Ahh, thank you. Will try that as well
Try disabling hardware acceleration on whatever browser she's using, or switch to using a different YT frontend: https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends?tab=readme-ov-file#youtube
So, I changed my daily driver to linux several months ago and my gf a few weeks ago.
...
So, I changed [...] my gf a few weeks ago.
How's the new girlfriend?
what's ESO?
google suggests it's elder scrolls online, but i've never heard this before
Yes, shes been playing since launch