Hi, I’m a relatively new user of Bazzite and I wanted to share some of the problems I encountered during installation and getting games to work properly; and the solutions I found to help future users and perhaps even fix and prevent them in next releases.
My first problem was getting the live OS and consequent permanent installation to use my two screens.
As GPU I have an AMD (ATI) Radeon HD 7700 Series which is one of the first GCN cards. It has 3 connectors of which I have screens connected to the DVI and HDMI ports. At boot both worked, but once Bazzite started loading, only the DVI connected screen would work.
As some research pointed towards a regression, I tried rolling back to the previous Bazzite version running on fc43. This led to some progress, as Bazzite would start loading now on both screens, but alas, crashed then a few times before rebooting with the fallback installation on fc44. Checking the logs for what was different or why it crashed, led me to the following solution: adding “radeon.si_support=1 amdgpu.si_support=0” to the bootargs (via “rpm-ostree kargs --editor”) and then rebooting and there it was, two screens. The loginscreen was still buggy but once logged in, all was fine.
But then came problem number two: trying to play a game that required Vulkan via Steam. Symptom number 1 was the preloading of vulkan shaders that took a couple of hours. And even after that, or when just skipping, the game would not run. Logs indicated a segfault but eventually I ended up finding out via the “vulkaninfo” util that my GPU wasn’t being used.
Back to the original problem: amdgpu. I needed to enable it again (by removing those bootargs) and find out why it didn’t use my second screen. To keep it short, the solution turned out to be adding a different bootarg: “amdgpu.dc=0”.
TL;DR: If you have and (old) AMD GPU and (one of) your screen(s) isn’t working, try adding this bootarg via “rpm-ostree kargs --editor” or “rpm-ostree kargs --append=”: “amdgpu.dc=0”.