Hi all, I've been having more and more trouble. I came here for some help with Bazzite, which ended up being solved or so I thought. I got to play Elden Ring for a few hours after which I turned off my PC. Everything ran perfectly smoothly with absolutely no issues. The next time I turned it on, the hard freezes started back up. I thought it might have been an Nvidia driver issue or an issue with Plasma, so I tried just about everything I could find to no avail. The next step was to see if reinstalling from the installation media would work, no boot. Tried again, no boot. Tried switching to bazzite gnome, no boot. Tried switching to Pop OS and the installation media won't boot. Every time, the one of the two same things happen with all of these attempts: a flash of artifacting, then a hard freeze, sometimes with the artifacting stuck, or everything but the cursor freezes for ~30sec then it freezes too. Both scenarios require a hard restart, but then the same thing happens. One useful price of information is that Tails works flawlessly, I run it on occasion from a USB (lately moreso to look things up because it's my only way to use my PC since this has been happening). I've checked that my GPU and drives etc are seated properly, all seems fine on the hw end. I'm at my wits end and I don't want to go back to windows. I clearly have a lot to learn still, but I never expected this to end up as difficult as it's been. Does anyone have any suggestions for me? I would love to be able to play Elden Ring, but at this point I just need a working system other than Tails.

After my previous post (here: https://lemmy.world/post/16593726 ), I took some of the advice I got and switched over to Bazzite for the time being. After some very minor tinkering, Elden Ring launches and runs great other that a very tiny amount of stuttering.

Played for a few hours today, then went to get RuneScape set up with one of the community launchers. I had good luck with nmlynch94's launcher on previous distro's, but this time no textures would load unless the camera was moving. I uninstalled and switched to the other one (red-dragon I think?) and the game wouldn't launch at all. After a little bit of back and forth uninstalling and reinstalling it, rebooting, etc. with no changes, I gave up and uninstalled everything related to the jagex launcher. Everything was working fine at that point still, shut everything down after browsing the web and listening to music like normal with no issues and now Bazzite won't launch at all. Almost every try ends up in it freezing at

"Booting 'Fedora Linux 40.20240619.0 (Bazzite) (ostree:0)'

_"

Once, it booted to the lock screen then froze. I have things set up and would prefer not to have to do a fresh install, but I'm not quite sure what to do. I have been unable to find much help searching the web. Does anyone have any insight for me?

Edit: Got it to boot from the ostree:1 option rather than 0, but it froze up within ~90 seconds. Shut down and it seems to be refusing to boot again.

Edit: Well, it booted up and I'm back to Elden Ring. No freezes or anything. Not sure what I did, so I'm still concerned.

I've been hoping to get Elden Ring up and running before the DLC comes out, but I haven't had much luck so far. I am a newbie to Linux, currently running Debian 12 w/ GNOME, Ryzen 9 3900X, GTX 1080 Ti.

I have tried every proton version and plenty of suggested launch options with slightly varying levels of "success", but the best I manage to get is Proton GE with no launch options and the game launches, flashes black, then white and then crashes, the whole time with the game's custom cursor. Most other combinations get me a black screen before launch, no launch, or nothing (but steam says its running for a minute).

I believe my video drivers are all up to date, but I am a newbie, like I said, so I'm not confident I didn't miss something. Has anyone else been running into this? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Update: I installed the proprietary Nvidia drivers and now only get a black screen or frozen terminal when I launch my PC. I'm currently in recovery mode and attempting to follow troubleshooting guides with no luck. "ERROR: The control display is undefined; please run 'nvidia-settings --help' for usage information." Is one of the errors I keep getting, but I only get part of the help dialogue, the rest is cut off. nvidia-smi just froze everything. Would it be a good idea to just go back to my installation media?