Sounds like you'd updated your system GPU drivers but not your flatpak ones. It's an oddity and I'm not sure what the fix is apart from knowing you always need to update flatpak when you pull in a driver update.
this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
18 points (90.9% liked)
Linux Gaming
18957 readers
18 users here now
Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
This page can be subscribed to via RSS.
Original /r/linux_gaming pengwing by uoou.
No memes/shitposts/low-effort posts, please.
Resources
WWW:
Discord:
IRC:
Matrix:
Telegram:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I agree that’s what it sounds like. Except I haven’t updated anything - or if something did update - it happened on its own.
On most distros, Flatpak has a separate auto-update process that runs independent of system upgrades. Disabling that “feature” should solve the problems you’re seeing.
Ok this is interesting. I wasn’t aware flatpaks could update on their own. I thought it was either “flatpak update” OR the package manager gui helper kicked off flatpak updates. I’ll have to dig into this on fedora. I’ve been running arch/endeavor for so long, it never occurred to me fedora may be auto updating flatpaks.
Yeah, definitely do this. Getting half a system update can cause all kinds of weird problems.
It can also be that NVIDIA cards have issue with different power states. My card will forget that it is connected to HDMI if it is idle for too long. It's entirely possible that the card just hibernated and the flatpak container removed it and failed to re-add it leading to CPU rendering, a reboot will fix this (which OP did as part of a system update).
You could fix it without a reboot, but that would require you digging into the problem a bit more. In my case, I wrote a script that re-set the display properties and that caused the DE to attempt to use the card again. I have it bound to a hotkey so if my display doesn't turn on, I can just press a button (instead of rebooting).
Sounds like your GPU isn't being engaged. What does nvidia-smi show?
I agree. I’ll check and report back tonight once I get home from work. It happens often enough, I might even be able to catch it in the act.
Due to the way Flatpak deals with nvidia drivers, you need to run flatpak update after any time the nvidia drivers update and you reboot the system. Thankfully you do not need to reboot after updating only flatpaks. Could not find a good source for this now, unfortunately.
As for the "why?" - flatpak apps do not contain the userspace parts of the nvidia driver required to use the GPU properly, they come packaged as separate runtimes. These nvidia driver runtimes need to match the specific driver version you are currently running. If they don't match, flatpak downloads the right runtimes when updating.
I have had weird issues ever since upgrading in place from Fedora 41 to 42 also, but I have an AMD card. For example digikam suddenly stopped working unless I run it as flatpak or I force it to use the igpu. Smb4k stopped auto mounting and I sometimes have to try it a couple of times before it works. Random UI stuff would glitch and then be fixed in an update. Just odd stuff like that. I should reinstall fresh, but I don't want the hassle right now. My games and other apps work fine.
My only suggestion is to try forcing it to use the main GPU with an environment variable like DRI_PRIME. I don't know what it is for Nvidia though.