Note: This issue only applies to Nvidia, AMD users can have a completely different versions of Mesa installed on their system and in Flatpak. Nvidia drivers are closed source and they ship both the kernel and userspace drivers as one with no backwards compatibility so Flatpak must always use the exact same version as the system.
It's (almost) always Nvidia.
It’s (almost) always Nvidia.
A philosopher once said:
Praise AMD
Sadly, there's close to no AMD dGPU laptops, at least in my area. And the 3 or so models that exist are wildly more expensive...
AMD has learned that laptop gamers don't give a shit about anything that's not Nvidia. Their dGPU laptop solutions were never desirable for the general market, so they've instead started focussing a lot more on stronger APUs.
Part of the reason for that is because their iGPUs are actually worth gaming on, see: Steam Deck and both the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles.
It's so-so, tbh.
I looked up the best AMD iGPU, and that seems to be the Radeon 8060S. That one is, from what I can see, about on par with the 4070 laptop. In gaming, it's a bit worse. In other workloads, it's a bit better.
But the cheapest laptop I can find with an 8060S is some HP Zbook Ultra G1a for €2800. I got my Lenovo LOQ with a 4070 for €900.
Oh man, I knew it had something to do with the Flatpack Nvidia driver packages. This happened to me several times with Heroic trying to play a game that wasn't even recent by any means.
I think (could be wrong), but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the opposite too. Steam flatpak, or steam itself (via the little steam is updating popup upon steam startup), will update on its own - and my video drivers don’t work properly until I update the entire system (which fixes it every time).
Doesn’t happen often - but often enough for me to catch it. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going on…
usually nvidia drivers will need to be updated inside the flatpak too, which means updating and rebooting. i have the exact same quirk when i'm using my nvidia card
huh, these packages install automatically for me in the nvidia card. i have lutris and steam installed too, which might probably have installed them.
we should probaby talk to the maintainer of the flatpak if that's not installed as a dependency for heroic by default.
It is a dependency, and it does get installed, but the version of the nvidia driver inside the flatpak environment needs to exactly match the system's nvidia driver, or things break.
At this point you might as well just save the headache and install Heroic directly
Would have been better, but Fedora has Heroic only as Flatpak in their repos. At least as far as I can see.
My bad, I should have checked before commenting 🤦♂️
The official Github does list a COPR repo but it seems the last build failed 2 months ago, so it only has version 2.17.2 instead of 2.18...
Thanks! This is a great tip. I've running into this myself and now I will regularly update the flatpacks.
This is because flatpak has a layer of isolation and installs its own copy of the drivers. If your system driver gets updated, then the flatpak one isn't matching.
If you update your system, you should always update everything, including flatpak.
What really tripped me up is that apparently either flatpak, heroic or proton has some kind of software rendering mode that works but is crazy slow. I expected driver problems to cause everything to just not work at all. Instead, everything slowed to a crawl and I couldn't figure out why.
Yeah I also thought the same thing. It's interesting that it still works, just really poorly.
How many weeks usually before the flatpak authors update?
In my experience, less than 3 days
Idk whether there's delay, but this also applies to minor version changes of Nvidia drivers. They must match exactly.
Are you saying that when updating your system with the GUI system updater that the flatpak update will be in there too? Or do you still need to run flatpak update in terminal seperate?
they are just saying that if you update your system packages, update your flatpak packages too. It's all distro dependent in regard to how you achieve that. I personally use topgrade in my terminal, and it runs all the update commands (pacman, aur, fwupd, flatpak, gnome shell extensions, vs code extensions) in order.
Gotcha. Thank you
To simplify this you might also try something like topgrade.
It does system updates, flatpak updates and other stuff all at once.
Nice project, didn't know that one. Thanks!
Flatpaks: How to reinvent RPMs poorly.
you are thinking of DEBs, but in reverse
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