I just wanted to drop a quick post here, I just did my monthly test of Fedora 42 KDE on my Dell Latitude, and its still a horrible laggy mess with the Intel GPU spiking to 100% with both FireFox and Brave when trying to run YouTube, its been quite rough and unusable since release, I just through I would try Bazzite on this system, and its perfect, no issues at all.
So what ever magic the devs do under the hood, shows, as Bazzite on this exat same machine, testing Firefox and Brave its smooth as silk, fast snappy and no lag at all
The machine is a Dell Latitude 7210 2 in 1 and runs a 10th Gen i7 16GB of ram and should really be a perfect machiner for Fedora, but its like I’m running something much slower, I dont know what they are doing, Ive seen a few complaing of the same 100% GPU spikes, but the issue remains.
I also installed CachyOS, and it too is very much the same as Bazzite, perfect, no lag or spikes, perfectly smooth, but to barebones for me, so I have decided to just keep Bazzite on the machine, or maybe I might tryout Aurora as I dont game on this thing.
The GPU spiking issue you were experiencing on Fedora 42 KDE was likely due to missing or incorrectly configured hardware video acceleration drivers. Installing the proper VA-API packages and swapping to intel-media-driver would have offloaded video decoding to your GPU properly, eliminating the CPU bottleneck and GPU spikes you saw with Firefox and Brave on YouTube.
Bazzite and CachyOS probably have these drivers pre-configured correctly, which is why they performed smoothly on the same hardware
You mean all this stuff?
sudo dnf install Making sure you're not a bot!(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
sudo dnf install libavcodec-freeworld
sudo dnf swap ffmpeg-free ffmpeg --allowerasing
sudo dnf update @multimedia --setopt=“install_weak_deps=False” --exclude=PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin
sudo dnf install intel-media-driver
sudo dnf install rpmfusion-free-release-tainted
sudo dnf install libdvdcss
sudo dnf install rpmfusion-nonfree-release-tainted
sudo dnf --repo=rpmfusion-nonfree-tainted install “*-firmware”
I did all this and tried all sorts of other things, not my first Rodeo, nothing seems to fix it, has been an issue since 42 was released, I did try the older Intel driver (libva-intel-driver) nothing had any real effect, all browsers had HW decode for HEVC enabled and working, same for other operating systems, also same in Bazzite, I also tried Flatpack and native versions of the browsers, issue was persistant.
Fedora lags because it ships older Mesa and a stock kernel with conservative power and scheduler settings.
Bazzite rebuilds Fedora with a newer Mesa, low-latency kernel patches, tuned i915 flags, and pre-enabled VA-API codecs.
Fedora prioritizes policy; Bazzite aligns kernel, drivers, and compositor for performance, that’s why it feels smooth.
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I thought this might have been the case, as Bazzite is almost as snappy as CachyOS, which is borderline pregog responsive, (Not gaming, just KDE) but Fedora 42 really feels bad at the moment, so I will be leaving it on my daily driver Latitude for a little while, as I have not hot any brick walls or deal breakers yet.
Whatever the devs are doing with this OS, I hope they keep doing, as red tape and policy will only hinder you, not help 
I know this as I work for a multi-national corporation
Bazzite desktop version on a detachable now feels like a real good open Android tablet, having an Atomic foundation makes it feel this way, If I get some time, I will see how Aurora is, as this might be the perfect choice for this machine as its not really used for any gaming.
I think the only thing that could improve this OS on a detachable surface pro like device, would be a better onscreen keyboard, maybe when this gets rolled into KDE: Plasma / Plasma Keyboard · GitLab