I have that crackling thing sometimes too, but only on desktop and not on Steam Deck, so the issue lies in something that’s different between those two things. On my desktop, my usual use case is to have a bunch of programs open at any given time and put it to sleep at the end of the night rather than close everything and power off. While low spec games like Skullgirls are fine, if I boot up a higher spec game like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II after waking my computer from sleep, I’ll get the crackling. If I just rebooted, the crackling is gone. I don’t understand the problem, but at least I have a workaround, and it’s better than Microsoft determining when I should reboot my computer. It’s my computer. I decide that.
Comment on Steam Survey for July 2025 shows Linux approaching 3%
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 3 weeks ago
I switched to linux because fuck microsoft. So far it’s been fine. A minor issue with crackling in the audio in one game, and I can’t figure out how to disable the “drag a window to the edge and it wants to tile it” thing (popos with the default gnome desktop environment). But those are minor things- my windows install I couldn’t get the bluetooth to connect to one device, and a bunch of other little annoyances were inescapable.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 3 weeks ago
Yeah I don’t get it when just playing music or watching video. It’s mostly been when playing Guild Wars 2 in scenes with a lot of players. I wonder if there’s something like “when the CPU is in high demand, the audio gets less priority” happening. I saw some posts about a cpu “niceness” value but I’m not familiar enough to fuss with it, and it’s not a big deal right now.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I did fuss with it according to the directions in forums, and it didn’t change anything, but I also barely understood what I was doing.
ClassyHatter@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
Gamemode, that I mentioned in another message, among other things changes the niceness value.
ClassyHatter@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
Try searching internet for something like: Linux proton crackling
Are you using gamemode, and have you added your user to the gamemode group? Crackling is likely caused by buffer underrun. Many reasons why that might happen, but one is that if the game isn’t given high enough privileges, the machine can’t fill the buffer quickly enough. Gamemode should solve that. Check your distro’s guide how to set it up. If that doesn’t work, Pipewire/PulseAudio might have been configured to use too short buffer.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 3 weeks ago
I don’t think I know what gamemode is. Is it github.com/FeralInteractive/gamemode ?
I’ll do some searching for crackling next time I’m at the desktop
ClassyHatter@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
That’s the thing. It’s most likely in your distro’s package manager, unless you are using CachyOS, which uses different app for the same thing. Remember to add your user to the gamemode group or it won’t do much for you.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Are those instructions current? I don’t see it on the readme on the git project, and installing it from Kubuntu’s package manager didn’t create a gamemode group (it also doesn’t come with a manual page).
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
If you have an issue with the way gnome works by default, then you are using it wrong and you should feel ashamed for that.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 3 weeks ago
For anyone in the future, I figured out how to turn off the edge tiling thing (which is what it’s called when a window touches the edge and it wants to resize it)
gsettings set org.gnome.mutter edge-tiling falseper askubuntu.com/…/how-to-disable-auto-resizing-of-w…