this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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PSA: Flatpak likes to mess with GPU drivers. If you experience terrible performance with Flatpak Heroic, try this (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by squaresinger@lemmy.world to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
37 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Disclaimer: Someone in the comments pointed out that this affects Nvidia only. I don't have AMD, so I can't verify if that's correct, but likely this is only for fellow sufferers of the Green Nightmare.

I had this issue for months. Randomly, the performance for games would be abysmal (I'm talking 5 FPS in 10yo indie 3D titles). Then it would randomly work again for a few days or weeks until it would become terrible again.

Turns out, the reason for that was that flatpak appears to cause trouble when the system GPU driver is updated, but flatpak update isn't run. So when I did dnf update (and it updated the Nvidia driver) without running flatpak update afterwards, the performance would suck, until something (or I) ran flatpak update again.

So if the performance in games launched through a flatpak version of a launcher like heroic sucks, run flatpak update.

And if that doesn't work, run

flatpak install flathub org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-575-64-05 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-575-64-05

(Replace the version with your Nvidia driver version, and in case of AMD, google whatever the appropriate way is to install the drivers for flatpak.)

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[–] matcha_addict@lemy.lol 18 points 2 days ago (4 children)

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.

[–] sic_semper_tyrannis@lemmy.today 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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?

[–] EccTM@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sic_semper_tyrannis@lemmy.today 3 points 2 days ago

Gotcha. Thank you

[–] kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 days ago

I have an alias for 'up' that runs an apt update and full-upgrade, flatpak upgrade, and snap upgrade, plus flushes old cache.

[–] Banzai51@midwest.social 3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

How many weeks usually before the flatpak authors update?

[–] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 2 days ago

Idk whether there's delay, but this also applies to minor version changes of Nvidia drivers. They must match exactly.

[–] thelittleblackbird@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

In my experience, less than 3 days

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] matcha_addict@lemy.lol 3 points 2 days ago

Yeah I also thought the same thing. It's interesting that it still works, just really poorly.