I was recently lucky enough to buy an OLED monitor and it's great. What is not so great is the amount of flickering I get in Gnome now when I have the experimental VRR setting enabled.

Now all OLED monitors have a certain amount of VRR flicker, but I am comparing it to my Windows duel boot and it's absolutely terrible under Gnome, like just a noticeable increase in the amount of flicker under both games and the desktop versus Windows. The only way I get Windows to flicker as much on the desktop is if I turn on "dynamic refresh rate", which kind of appears to be what Gnome is doing all the time. I can turn on the refresh rate panel on my monitor and Gnome can fluctuate all over the place, even on the desktop, whereas Windows is steady at max refresh (again one I turn off dynamic refresh rate, which is a separate setting then VRR).

For games the flicker is way worse using proton under Wayland (which GE supports). Hunt Showdown - which I play a lot, looks incredibly flickery when vsync and Wayland are turned on, it basically has a strobing effect.

Anyone else seen this in action? Any suggestions for a fix? Should I swap over to KDE for a bit until Gnome gets this straightened out or will Plasma have the same problems?

Update (11/11/25) I've been on KDE basically since I created this post and while there is still a little VRR flicker (it's the nature of OLEDs) it is far better then under Gnome and it appears to be getting better with each release, or I am just getting really used to it.

I also tried out Gnome 49 briefly to see if this was fixed and sadly it's still really bad in game, though I no longer noticed it on the desktop.

I have 2 drives in my machine. Linux right now is installed on 1/4 of the first drive and I am going to start moving parts of my 2nd drive, which is just games on Windows, to a 1/2 combo of NTFS and BTRFS. Essentially giving Linux more space as it replaces Windows as my gaming daily driver. With the eventual plan to move that entire 2nd drive over to BTRFS, and allow Windows to have 3/4 of the 1st drive for games that only run under it.

Curious how folks have set this up. Currently I have Steam, Heroic and Lutris installing to ~/Games. So it may make sense to mount my new drive there, but I am not sure that in home folder mounts make sense. I also realize I could potentially use BTRFS to make it look like my space is all one mount point vs multiple, but given the complexity of that filesystem I am worried there is a downside I am not aware of.

Any suggestions? What has worked for you for your setup?

I am using the Steam Flatpak on OpenSuse Tumbleweed and when using the Steam interface, specifically when I get a chat message or try to respond to one, the Steam UI will hard freeze, as in a I can't type or move windows or interact with anything and then 30 seconds or so later everything goes back to normal. Plasma is still response when all of this is going on, it's just the Steam UI that freezes.

It's super odd and I have been running the Flatpak in the terminal to see if I can chat any relevant log messages but haven't seen any yet. It's been a little bit since I used the OpenSuse package and I think I remember seeing these freezes occasionally, but they seem much more common on the Flatpak version.

Anyone else get this behavior?

Not sure what happened but I've been running Steam games using MANGOHUD=1 gamemoderun %command% and it's been working fine with Mangohud. Suddenly, no Mangohud. Mangohud still works with Lutris.

I am using the Flatpak version so I looked at my history and there haven't been any updates to the Steam or Mangohud Flatpaks when the breakage occurred. Nothing relevant is logged out if I run Steam using flatpak run com.valvesoftware.Steam. Inside Steam there have been a few updates, including an update to the common redistributable and that may have been around the time this broke. The only other thing I see is that Gnome updated some Flatpak stuff recently as well.

System wise I am on OpenSuse Tumbleweed using KDE Plasma 6. Any tips for debugging further?

Relevant Flatpak packages

Name                              Application ID                                Version  Branch       Installation
Valve Corporation                 com.valvesoftware.Steam                       1.0.0.79 stable       system
Mesa                              org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default           24.0.3   22.08        system
Mesa (Extra)                      org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default           24.0.3   22.08-extra  system
Mesa                              org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default           24.0.3   23.08        system
Mesa (Extra)                      org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default           24.0.3   23.08-extra  system
Mesa                              org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.default         24.0.3   23.08        system
Mesa (Extra)                      org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.default         24.0.3   23.08-extra  system
MangoHud                          org.freedesktop.Platform.VulkanLayer.MangoHud 0.6.8    21.08        system
MangoHud                          org.freedesktop.Platform.VulkanLayer.MangoHud 0.7.1    23.08        system
gamescope                         …g.freedesktop.Platform.VulkanLayer.gamescope 3.14.2   23.08        system
Freedesktop SDK                   org.freedesktop.Sdk                           23.08.14 23.08        system
GNOME Application Platform versi… org.gnome.Platform                                     45           system
GNOME Application Platform versi… org.gnome.Platform                                     46           system
i386                              org.gnome.Platform.Compat.i386                         45           system
Breeze GTK theme                  org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Breeze                      6.0.3    3.22         system
Adwaita theme                     org.kde.KStyle.Adwaita                                 6.5          system
KDE Application Platform          org.kde.Platform                                       6.5          system
DXVK                              org.winehq.Wine.DLLs.dxvk                     2.3      stable-23.08 system

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As the title asks, how does one actually use HDR for games after upgrading to Plasma 6?

This was the feature I was most excited about, and I can hit the HDR button on my display configuration and it looks like the desktop is going into HDR mode, but so far I have had zero luck enabling the HDR feature in games. Every game I've tried had the HDR toggle disabled with no way to enable it.

I am running these games under Proton and I've tried both 8-GE and 9 Beta. Any tips?

Edit: probably important to note that I am using an AMD GPU under Wayland

I was going to going to ask this question because Steam Flatpak was listed as last being updated May 2023, but they just updated it yesterday. That's still about 9 month between updates.

In general if I am on rolling release like OpenSuse Tumbleweed is my Steam package and Mesa drivers going to be more up to date then what the Steam Flatpak provides or are they updating the Flatpak and dependencies more frequently then the Discover app is suggesting?

I've done some Googling on this topic and some folks are saying it should just work and that distro I am on, OpenSuse, used to patch Firefox with support for global menus or that the Plasma extension should give you support but I haven't been able to get anything to work.

Anyone know what is needed / if this is even possible with current Firefox?

Me again!

Using Discord while playing Hunt Showdown and if I alt+tab away from the game into Discord to volume adjust, unmute myself or someone else, the left clicks are going to the game and causing some not so great misfires. Anyway to prevent the left click from propagating into the game window?

Using KDE + Wayland and Discord Flatpak if that effects it at all.

Weirdest damn thing, occasionally my network connectivity was being lost. Not the wifi signal, but just the route to the internet. I finally realized today it happens whenever I do a fresh boot (i.e. first time after system boot) of Heroic Games Launcher.

I am running OpenSuse Tumbleweed and using the Heroic Flatpak. Any idea how I would debug what the heck is going on so I can give a bug report to the Flatpak maintainers? I was poking around /var/log but didn't see anything interesting.

Edit: Correction, it brings down my network on every single launch, not just from a fresh boot. The network eventually comes back up, but it blips for a good few minutes.

Message that pops up in KDE is "This device appears to be connected to a network but is unable to reach the internet. " and trying to open websites leads to an error page.

Like the title says I am trying to understand how these things should work together. Part of my issue is I don't have a good mental model on the Flatpak permissioning / sandbox model. My use case is running a game on Lutris, which is a Flatpack, and using my package install of Mangohud. I am also curious if I should using a Flatpak version of Mangohud instead of the package installed version, and understanding how I would set up Steam as a Flatpak in the future when I switch away from the packaged version.

Thanks for any helpful tips or links you can provide.