I have multiple internet issues that I can only produce on Bazzite - the moment I boot back in to Windows 10, all of these issues do not persist, and no other devices on my network appear to have this issue.
Context:
I have not updated/changed any network settings in multiple years, I also have checked my network firmware is up to date (Orbi RBR50), not a recent update.
I am using Wifi due to location of my router, I don’t have an ethernet cable spare to test direct connection right now.
I have not tested on other distributions yet
Issues:
My internet always displays “Limited Connectivity” in the quickbar.
I am experiencing regular dropouts or significant lag spikes quite regularly. This is not app specific - I am seeing my in/out traffic drop to zero, Discord lags, MS Teams will do the “trying to reconnect you” screen, livestreams drop out.
Many (but not all) online games are not allowing me to connect to their online services.
Some examples for games for issue #3:
Halo MCC - I can’t get a response for any requests to the servers in the Network setting that checks your ping to all regions. Can see my XBL account details
Meccha Chameleon - can see server names, but can’t connect
Windjammers 2 - won’t connect to the online options - as in, stuck on “connecting” before the online menus show up
Steam Remote Play - I haven’t tested this in depth, but a friend tried to invite me to this yesterday and when I accepted, nothing happened and his request was still seen as unaccepted.
Games that do work online:
Forza Horizon 6 - I was surprised about this given it’s another MS game like Halo. I know they’re different devs but still would have assumed the networking may have been similar. I do get a lot of alerts about my connection while playing Forza, but have had little issues and have assumed thats mostly the game itself
I have tried switching from IWD to WDA-supplicant, no change.
No major issues with speed though havent tested details
Hi, I am assuming you are dual booting with windows…if so please check the docs page below for more info…also make sure fast boot in windows is off (scroll up a bit on the docs page for instructions there)
In most cases the router itself may not be to blame, instead the wifi adapter tends to be the issue…
Are you using a laptop or a desktop?
I am assuming you have built-in wifi adapter (not usb plug-in)?
You may need to look up the specific wifi chip you have…some have proprietary firmware/drivers that don’t always play nice with linux. If you have a broadcom chip- that one has some known issues in linux..there is a ujust command in the terminal that may help…but that is only if you have a broadcom chip. Please do more research before making any change in the terminal.
Hey Parma, since you have an Intel AX201, your driver support should be pretty damn solid in Linux, so we can most likely rule out a firmware issue.
Sometimes that ‘Limited Connectivity’ message coupled with specific game drops means there is an issue with how Bazzite is communicating with your Orbi router regarding DNS or IPv6. I’ve noticed that mesh systems - like yours sometimes handle IPv6 routing poorly with Linux network managers… And sometimes an ISP DNS server is the problem
So let’s try these quick steps in your network manager in Desktop Mode:
Disable IPv6: Switch your Wi-Fi connection’s IPv6 setting from ‘Automatic’ to ‘Disabled’ and reconnect. And test if it works. If not, move on to the next step.
Set Manual DNS: Change your IPv4 DNS to a public one like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8. And test if it works. If not, move on to the next step.
If you’re still no having any luck - maybe changing MTU size of the Wi-Fi connection from “Automatic” to a standard lower value like 1452 or 1492 instead of the default 1500
And if all that doesn’t work, change it all back to defaults and wait for someone smarter than me to help!
Funnily enough I already had both suggestion 1 and 2 done, so unfortunately no luck there. I have now switched over the MTU to 1492, will keep it on and monitor for a few days and see if that at least solves the dropout/spiking problems!
I did have a thought about the drivers. Bazzite comes with it out of the box, but I’m wondering if there is value in manually installing the Intel drivers directly? My concern would be potentially duplication and then making things worse and having a big cleanup on my hands.
My other thought is on the gaming connection issues - if this was an issue on Windows or network-wide, I would just port forward. I don’t even know if port forwarding is the workaround here, just thinking about what I could learn about the overall issue if I did that test?
So, I had a theory that it was firewalld which is built into bazzite.
I disabled the service according to their documentation, confirmed it was not actively running, then tried one of the games I mentioned above - no dice
I’ve also tried using the Firewall GUI that comes with Bazzite and using the “services” feature to trust steam-streaming as that is also not working for me - no dice I have also tried manually port forwarding on my router’s dashboard, no dice
In the Firewall GUI, in talking to a friend he has something listed under “Interfaces” whereas I don’t, I just have my “Connections” - I can’t find what “Interfaces” means in the documentation or whether that’s something I should have, or whether its just something he has in his due to network differences?
On the positive front, it seems that the suggestion to change the MTU on the router from 1500 to 1492 has mostly stopped the dropouts from what I can tell. Very strange that it was only a problem on Bazzite though despite being a network level change.
After working through all those options and not seeing any improvements, I believe I found the problem.
For the record, the MTU change that I thought had fixed things was purely coincedental - had been monitoring the past couple weeks and things were back to normal (as in, dropouts were back), if not worse the last few days.
While one of the first things I did when troubleshooting was ensure my AdGuard VPN service was not auto-starting and stopped , it was actually AdGuard (the non-VPN service) that was causing issues in the background. Not exactly sure why, I have deactivated for now as I have the browser apps and they work perfectly fine for the majority of my use cases.
First time I haven’t seen “limited connectivity” (albeit my wifi strength in the taskbar is still not 1:1 to windows, unless they use different definitions). Haven’t had any dropouts in several hours, and can use the multiplayer services listed above.
Why Adguards daemon was causing these issues is beyond me as I use a mostly same config on Windows without issue - must be a small change in the config that has caused it. The dropouts I could understand as something to do with the certificates, but why it was blocking access to some video game services is confusing.
I’ll keep an eye over the next few days and then mark this ticket as resolved.
