So, I changed my daily driver to linux several months ago and my gf a few weeks ago. I noticed 2 strange but good things after the change. For my system I have a onboard sound card (stereo) and am using 3 of the 5 speakers for my decade or so old Creative labs 5.1 speakers. Under win 10 most of my sound came from the left and centre speakers with base cannon doing its thing, under linux using the generic drivers included during install all 3 desktop speakers put out the appropriate sound. YAY!

My gf is using my old hand me down prebuilt. Under win 10 the fans on that thing would be kicking on and off constantly, I could hear the fans over the running water doing dishes. Now? 99% of the time is straight silence unless she is playing ESO.

Only issue left on her machine is having it be able to play ESO and be able to watch a yt vid at the same time. 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. forget which intel cpu is in there(it’s about 8-10 yrs old iirc), GTX 1060 6 3gb, and 16gb ram, Kubuntu 24.04, KDE. Are we asking too much of the system, did I misconfigure something? She was able to do this on windows

  • MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zipEnglish
    8·
    23 hours ago

    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.

    • lost_faith@lemmy.caOP
      5·
      22 hours ago

      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

      • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
        4·
        21 hours ago

        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.

      • MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zipEnglish
        5·
        22 hours ago

        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.)