Hi friends
TLDR: It seems that Vulkan games are harming my DE and damaging the graphics driver
I noticed that when playing games with Vulkan on Steam it seems to damage my KDE Plasma, it happened to me just now with Team Fortress 2, I tried to play it and it didn’t start, now my KDE Plasma is stuck on a black screen, even when I restart when I log in it goes like that, just connecting a second screen makes the main one appear again but when I remove it it goes black, yes, I can hear and everything but I can’t see anything, it works with other users but even reverting the errors and such it doesn’t work to restore that user, could it have something to do with the drivers or something?
I’m using KDE Plasma on X11, Debian 12
This game works fine on OpenGL and Vulkan in others DE
I’ve checked X11 logs and there’s not issues with video drivers, again, this game and others apps works fine in GNOME, XFCE and Trinity
I want to restore my actual session because I don’t want to make another one with the risk of this happen again
Sorry this isn’t a direct “troubleshooting” answer, but to possibly, hopefully, save some pain in the future…
Gaming on Linux benefits greatly from continuous, iterative improvements up and down the software stack - base hardware drivers, libraries used by games, etc.
KDE Plasma’s development model fits much better with faster, iterative releases of software - like the model used by Linux distributions like openSUSE Tumbleweed, Arch, and the Fedora KDE Spin - than with “pinning” a milestone version number and then leaving things unchanged from there.
On the other hand, the philosophy of Debian is to freeze a snapshot in time of software packages comprising the entire operating system, declare that to be “good”, and then perform the absolute minimum amount of patching required to fix major security issues or showstopper bugs impacting huge numbers of people. Those versions are then kept frozen for multiple years until the next release.
In short - there may likely be a solution to the specific problem you’re seeing…but in my experience you’re likely to have fewer problems gaming by using an operating system that’s closer to current than what the Debian model is designed for (I’m personally using Fedora KDE Spin right now and it’s working really well).
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