this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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PSA: Flatpak likes to mess with GPU drivers. If you experience terrible performance with Flatpak Heroic, try this (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by squaresinger@lemmy.world to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
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Disclaimer: Someone in the comments pointed out that this affects Nvidia only. I don't have AMD, so I can't verify if that's correct, but likely this is only for fellow sufferers of the Green Nightmare.

I had this issue for months. Randomly, the performance for games would be abysmal (I'm talking 5 FPS in 10yo indie 3D titles). Then it would randomly work again for a few days or weeks until it would become terrible again.

Turns out, the reason for that was that flatpak appears to cause trouble when the system GPU driver is updated, but flatpak update isn't run. So when I did dnf update (and it updated the Nvidia driver) without running flatpak update afterwards, the performance would suck, until something (or I) ran flatpak update again.

So if the performance in games launched through a flatpak version of a launcher like heroic sucks, run flatpak update.

And if that doesn't work, run

flatpak install flathub org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-575-64-05 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-575-64-05

(Replace the version with your Nvidia driver version, and in case of AMD, google whatever the appropriate way is to install the drivers for flatpak.)

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[–] matcha_addict@lemy.lol 18 points 1 week ago (9 children)

This is because flatpak has a layer of isolation and installs its own copy of the drivers. If your system driver gets updated, then the flatpak one isn't matching.

If you update your system, you should always update everything, including flatpak.

[–] sic_semper_tyrannis 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Are you saying that when updating your system with the GUI system updater that the flatpak update will be in there too? Or do you still need to run flatpak update in terminal seperate?

[–] EccTM@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

they are just saying that if you update your system packages, update your flatpak packages too. It's all distro dependent in regard to how you achieve that. I personally use topgrade in my terminal, and it runs all the update commands (pacman, aur, fwupd, flatpak, gnome shell extensions, vs code extensions) in order.

[–] sic_semper_tyrannis 3 points 1 week ago

Gotcha. Thank you

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