TL;DR - Video games freeze in Cinnamon but not in Gnome?
Hi!
I am a newbie in Nixos, but I like it.
So I have encountered a strange bug recently - when I was playing DOTA or CS2 - it pretty soon after launch got frozen to the point that I cannot even access tty session - it is completely unresponsive, only reboot helps.
After investigation - I discovered that it only happened on Cinnamon and other KDEs, but not on Gnome.
If I switched to Gnome, I didn’t even need to reboot, just rebuild and it runs totally fine!
But the problem is - since I come from Linux Mint - I really want to stay on Cinnamon all the time, without this strange switching.
First of all - thank you for being the first to reply!
After further testing I discovered that the games run totally fine only UNTIL I start playing music in Google chrome? It instantly freezes up.
I tried opening incognito tab and thats it - runs fine
I tried opening websites with no music - runs fine
I tried opening youtube, even with muted tabs - freezes
I also tried opening deezer and start the music playing - freezes
Somebody in other chat suggested to look at my capslock if it was blinking or not (panicked) - but it is not blinking.
The freeze occurs - the music still keeps going for the next 5 seconds and the pc becomes totally unresponsive until reboot.
So far I just switch between Gnome and Cinnamon DE - but I’d really like to just stick with Cinnamon for all cases.
Here are the logs: https://pastebin.com/AaPGNkV8
Specifically, at first my sound didn’t work on nix, so I added this
# Enable sound with pipewire.
hardware.pulseaudio.enable = false;
security.rtkit.enable = true;
services.pipewire = {
enable = true;
alsa.enable = true;
alsa.support32Bit = true;
pulse.enable = true;
# If you want to use JACK applications, uncomment this
jack.enable = true;
# use the example session manager (no others are packaged yet so this is enabled by default,
# no need to redefine it in your config for now)
#media-session.enable = true;
};
After that the sound was working but not with headphones, so I had to manually tweak it in the program called pwvucontrol
After I had that set up, I never tweaked with sounds in my config
Sorry for taking so long. I was testing all possible variants.
The pc freezes regardless of whether the headphones plugged in or not
None of the variants helped, disabling jack or pipewire, or pulseaudio - it was frozen in all those cases.
Logs:
With Jack and Pipewire - disabled
Jack and Pipewire disabled, pulswire enabled
but on Gnome it runs all the times without any freezes
Edit: sorry, didnt allow me to post link to pastebin with the logs and also community flagged me as “spam or advertisement”???.
Great
Im just trying to fix this annoying bug
I don’t think that my laptop is bad in terms of Cinnamon taking too much of GPU or whatever - I come from Linux Mint and it was never an issue. So I disregarded that case right off the bat
This should be enough to run if without any issues
But it really never occurred to me to try it with another browser - and oh god - it really helped!??!?!?!
I just tried to play CS or Dota with Firefox running instead of chrome - and it runs with no freezes at all.
I really don’t want to investigate this dirty thingy any further, so I will stick with this solution.
When gaming - use Firefox for background music
For everything else - use Chrome
Also, Android Studio is stupidly laggy on GNOME - but runs way faster on Cinnamon, I don’t know why, but it is.
In any ways, thank you for your help, you really saved me, I guess we can close it now