Problem statement:

When running EmulationStation Desktop Edition (ES-DE) 3.1.1 (installed from AUR), I'm able to browse through games and watch the video previews after hovering over a game for a second but the audio is noticeably stuttering and crunchy. Audio quality in video previews continues to degrade over time until EmulationStation eventually freezes after only 5-10 minutes of use.

EDIT: Further clarification, crashes only happen while video previews are actively playing which is why I feel the issue is so heavily correlated. ES-DE can continue to be used if video previews are disabled, not shown in theme, or it sits resting on a menu item that does not play a video preview.

Navigation audio is crisp, as is the input and feeling of navigating menus, it doesn't seem to be straining any system resources I can see in System Monitor. Audio in emulators launched through ES-DE is perfectly fine. All videos are stored in appropriate directories in ~/ES-DE/downloaded_media/ and play without issue when opened through VLC. They were downloaded through the built-in connection to https://www.screenscraper.fr/ using the personal account I set up, so I don't feel there are any issues with the source files.

I've also increased the VRAM limit from the default(?) value of 512MiB to 672MiB but haven't noticed any difference, I don't feel like it should need that much to begin with.

~/ES-DE/logs/es_log.txt contains no additional information after the crash. When exiting cleanly I see "ES-DE cleanly shutting down" but when frozen this line is omitted. This is probably due to me having to force quit it, if there are any ways to collect better logs or error info, please let me know.

Hardware and other info:

This is happening on two completely different systems, my gaming desktop with an AMD 5900x and 3080 RTX (proprietary drivers) as well as an old Lenovo something with Intel and something integrated. Both are running Arch with KDE Plasma on Wayland (though X11 also seems to have the issue for whatever that's worth). Let me know what other details may be helpful to provide. Audio is pipewire.

I documented my whole setup process for this so I could replicate it on any system I installed and given how dissimilar the systems are otherwise, I feel like this must be a case of some easy misconfiguration I'm missing or weird dependency I don't have installed? I've tried searching, but internet search is worthless these days. I appreciate any thoughts anyone might have on the issue, any threads I can pull would be helpful. Thanks!

The Original Command and Conquer, Red Alert, Generals, and Renegade have all been released under GPL licensing to the public.

I hope AMD fixed this on their side, maybe by implementing it in hardware. Does anyone have a source? I've only seen reports of HDMI 2.1b support not specifying "Windows-only". Fingers crossed.

I am gonna reinstall my system.

But I want to keep the Time played stat of the game.

I found all other data of lutris like banners, runners, runtimes but not this.

Any Idea where can I find Time played data, if it's even saved in file ?

Also does any you know where the KDE Plasma clipboard data is saved ? I've been using that as mini watch later list 😅

Hey folks. I’m a new dad which means my gaming time is at a premium, but I am going through a big cleanse of the enshittification era of the internet right now, and Windows 11 is kinda giving me bad vibes.

Last time I tried to run Linux it was ok and worked the majority of the time, but ray tracing and a few games caused some issues. I was also using game pass which of course doesn’t work on Linux, so I dropped back to windows.

How is Nvidia life these days? I’ve got a 3080 and an AMD 9800X3D so it should be fine for most games I imagine.