Basically, Bazzite does not consider steering wheel inputs as activity, so when playing a sim racing game on Steam, OS thinks the PC is idle and shuts off monitor after a set duration. At first I thought it was a game bug but it dawned on me pretty quickly.
So I turned off power saving features like sleep mode and monitor shut off and the problem is worked around for now, but it’s obviously not a solution. I’m glad this didn’t happen during an actual race as it could’ve ruined many people’s races.
The thing is, Heroic Launcher gets around this issue by blocking sleeping and screen switching mode when you launch a game and resuming it when you close the game. Unfortunately Steam doesn’t do that.
I don’t know where to report this though. Is this related to Bazzite, Fedora, kernel, Steam, I have no idea so wanted to write about it here to get some ideas. Maybe someone can lead me in the right direction or if possible report the issue through the correct channel.
Well, the problem basically is when you play a video game it doesn’t stop power-saving features. I’m thinking it’s a Wayland thing as they like to do things differently. From what I understand each software can request Wayland to stop those power-saving features temporarily. Firefox does it, for example, when you watch a video on Firefox and click the power saving icon on taskbar, you can see it tells “Firefox is blocking sleep and screen locking (video playing)”
Heroic Games Launcher also does this, but Steam doesn’t. For regular games this is not an issue, since you always press or click something but since turning the wheel isn’t detected as an activity, it naturally kicks in all power saving features one of which is turning off monitor. Vibrations from the wheel sometimes moves mouse which helps with the issue but inevitable it will cause an inactivity detection and turn off monitor.
I am guessing gamescope stops the power saving features like Firefox and heroic, but I don’t enjoy using gamescope, caused me several issues in the past. So I don’t use it unless it is necessary for a bug-fix or whatever. For now I disabled sleep and window disable in power saving settings as a workaround. I will try reporting this on KDE. Thanks for the response
Well, guess what just happened. Turns out it is indeed a KDE issue and they’re fixing it with 6.6
Currently, KWin’s handling of game controller input is fragmented. Applications directly manage controller input, leading to inconsistencies, the inability of the system to recognize controller input for power management, and unintentionally enabling/disabling “lizard mode” in certain controllers.
one of which is turning off monitor. Vibrations from the wheel sometimes moves mouse which helps with the issue but inevitable it will cause an inactivity detection and turn off monitor.