Odd Graphical Issues with KDE Neon on Steam Deck

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Hi! I’m submitting this on behalf of a friend, so forgive me if it seems a bit weird.

My friend is using the Steam Deck as her daily driver PC, and has installed KDE Neon on it to get a more full-featured Linux experience compared to SteamOS. It’s been doing her well so far.

As of the most recent update, she’s been reporting that her games have been having very long stutters, resulting in near-unplayable scenarios.

output

On a whim, she alt+tabbed during the game and found the game played just fine. I instantly recognized having this exact same problem with NVidia on Xorg and suggested putting the game in Windowed mode. Sure enough, the game worked fine. Same problem, but on AMD and Wayland! Weird.

My initial instinct is to report this as a bug. I didn’t see anyone else reporting this on these forums and I don’t see a bug report on it in the Bugzilla. Has anyone else been experiencing this issue with AMD graphics, or even specifically on the Steam Deck? Is there anyone who’s experienced this themselves and can suggest any solutions for this?

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I’d look at what the Deck has in terms of a custom kernel and more importantly, the Mesa drivers, as this might be helpful for this very specific and somewhat custom hardware.

SteamOS uses Gamescope which Valve’s Wayland compositor for the Deck that many use for Steam games in desktop Linux, so that might be worth installing and using for gaming as well.

You can upgrade Mesa from 25.0.x to 25.2 or later using the kisak PPA, though I am not terribly sure how much that might help.