Solus running too hot, shutting me out off Games on Steam

hsmenon

This is a very recent issue that Ive been facing with Solus, around 10 days ago, I had a fresh install of Solus Budgie. So what happens is, I start a game on Steam, usually Left for Dead 2 or Saints Row 4 and 5 minutes into the game, the game window closes. I'm using the Steam from the Solus App store. At first I thought it was me messing up something, I distrohopped to Debian where everything was flawless, got bored of Debian, then to Garuda Linux, Manjaro, Artix, Fedora which, did not have this issue, but then something or other in these distros annoy me and I finally came back to Solus Gnome, but this time, Saints Row 4 works with a few stutters and shuts after some time, but L4D2 straight up does not work for more than 2 minutes. I have an external monitor, keyboard and mouse connected to my laptop on which I played all these games, and I never really had to touch my laptop which is almost always plugged in. But today, when I was just browsing the internet on firefox, I thought to carry my laptop to my couch and I realised that it was running too hot. This hasn't happened on any distro ever, including Solus up until recently, cause I was on Solus last month for 3 weeks and had no issues then with gaming on it. My system has 12GB RAM, 6th gen i5 with mesa graphics, it's not the system, I've played GTA5 and even Saints Row and L4D2 with medium to ultra graphics respectively, yes the system runs hot when I game for long, but it has never shut me out of a game, which I think now, is due to thermal throttling, but my recent distro hops like a nut has left me to believe that this issue is only on Solus and is a very recent issue (within the last 10 days, and it seems to be worse on budgie than on GNOME), anyone else has these issues or know how to solve it?
I've attached a screenshot as well, I just have firefox with 3 tabs and system monitor open and my PC is running between 65 to 70% on 2 cores and at 90% on the other two cores.

Just a second later, it's running 3 cores 90% + load and 1 core at 32%.

Note: The screenshots were edited in during the review stage of the article, just to make it seem more convincing.

hsmenon

hsmenon ISSUE HAS BEEN SOLVED. Thank You!

Brucehankins

What process is eating up so much compute? Last time I had an issue like this was a long time ago, but the Gnome tracker and tracker-miner were the culprits.

hsmenon

Brucehankins
You're right, it is the gnome tracker miner that's leading the CPU% use. Is there anything I can do to fix it or should I wait for an update that fixes it. I'm usually the guy who just reads forums and not really posts on forums, hence I'm not sure what I do next to fix the issue.

hdansin

Did you notice any processes running (besides Firefox) that might be using up the CPU like that? Should be able to sort by CPU % in the system monitor.

hsmenon

hdansin
The highest CPU% usage is for gnome system monitor at 5.65%, everything else seems normal, also once the steam update was over, the cpu processes seem to have settled down to 10 to 30%

hsmenon

I just reinstalled steam and this happened, all 4 cores at 100% in just updating steam pins!

Brucehankins

hsmenon don't know if there's a fix, search the forums and you may find something unless someone more knowledgeable comes along.
I know it serves up the universal search and a few other functions for Gnome, but no idea what else it does. I just killed all the tracker processes and it instantly dropped my CPU usage. Have to do it every time I would boot up though. Haven't been having that issue lately.

Lucien_Lachance

you can nuke tracker by running
sudo systemctl mask tracker-miner-fs-3.service tracker-extract-3.service tracker-writeback-3.service tracker-xdg-portal-3.service tracker-miner-fs-control-3.service

i think thats all of them
in addition there might be a file running at startup in /usr/share/xdg/autostart that would need removing

to revert run the same command with unmask instead of mask, iirc

hsmenon

It actually worked, not only did it fix the game shut off issue, but there was also this other issue I didn't mention which was the dark maps in the game being too dark. But that was an almost universal issue with all distros but Debian 10 Buster which runs on GNOME 3.30 , and I almost always use Gnome as DE. And this fix of masking the gnome-tracker miner has given me the best gaming experience I've had in L4D2. Thank You SO MUCH Lucien_Lachance . I'd request the Solus devs to look into it and do the necessary to fix it with an update. There is nothing holding me back from quitting distrohopping and stick to SOLUS! Thanks everyone for the quick help and solutions!

Lucien_Lachance

hsmenon keep in mind, that if there was one or more tracker entries in /usr/share/xdg/autostart they will probably come back when a new version of gnome is installed. im not sure if masking the tracker services makes these unable to start or not

also, with future versions of gnome and new versions of tracker the tracker service names might change (they are called something else now than a year or 2 ago) and if so you'll need to investigate, their files should be in /usr/lib64/systemd and the subfolders (on debian they might be elsewhere)
they are probably also listed if u run systemctl list-unit-files

hsmenon

Lucien_Lachance Thank You for the heads up.

hsmenon

To the Devs working on GNOME at Solus, please fix this issue, it'll help all distros.

I'm dumbstruck that this issue has been plaguing all distros with GNOME that has been released in the past couple of years and nobody has fixed it. The game shutting off issue is exclusive to Solus, but the maps being dark issue was thought to be an issue of the game as some windows users also complained. Hence, every forum says that it's to do with the config files of the game where you mark the graphics as fixed. But I think nobody really knows that Gnome tracker miner is the culprit. Why can this issue not be fixed by any distro? Gnome is my favorite DE, but I really feel like giving upon GNOME. Budgie also has this same issue. It exists on Fedora too which is supposed to be the holy grail for GNOME.

BTW I just ran the systemctl lines to nuke gnome tracker, didn't remove any files and that worked fine, I request the devs to please fix it, I settled on Solus because it was the fastest to boot, shut down, least maintenance required, clean package manager unlike apt with their keys and repositories that has to be manually removed each time you uninstall something, the stability unlike Arch and a rolling release model that is much more stable than Open Suse Tumbleweed.

Solus checks all my boxes, so please please fix this gnome tracker issue if you can. I don't want to go back to Debian Archaic running Gnome 3.30 for stability, though that particular issue of Dark Maps is fixed on Debian 11 Bullseye sid running GNOME 3.38, it has other issues with GS Connect! Maybe the devs can look at Debain 11 for the gnome tracker issue solution, but there always has to be something broken on GNOME!

I hope you guys fix it with an update, regardless thanks for the awesome OS but imperfect DE of GNOME.

Lucien_Lachance

hsmenon i dont think this is for solus to fix, its the gnome people that wants everything indexed so you can search quickly for files and content. this is what gnome is.
but as we've seen it can be disabled, at least for now

hsmenon

Lucien_Lachance I had a feeling that was the case, cause every new distro with GNOME has it. But Solus is a rolling distro, we've gone from GNOME 40 to 40.1 in a month which is great news, but keeping an eye out for the updates and manually having to do the systemctl gnome miner disable is too much work and can be taxing on any rolling disro like Solus. But I guess maybe there is nothing they can do about it. I just wanted them to see if it could be done, but yeah, that's all GNOME!

However, the issue where the game shuts off is definitely for Solus to fix, I haven't experienced that until recently with Solus GNOME, this issue does not exist on other distros runing GNOME 40.1. I hope atleast this gets fixed. I really want to stay on Solus! Maybe I'll change to "too many customisation options that it gives me decision fatigue" cluttered KDE, Budgie has the same issues that GNOME has with the tracker.

Lucien_Lachance

hsmenon once masked you wont have to worry about that for quite some time

hsmenon

Lucien_Lachance Yes, I love GNOME work flow too much, but I'm going to install KDE along side for the gaming sessions until the issue gets fixed. In a Co-op game like L4D2 with custom maps and all 4 players being from 4 different countries, when the game is planned in advance , one actually looks like a traitor who leaves his friends to be left 4 dead when the game crashes on you unexpectedly and lord knows when the next GNOME update will hit me with that bad luck on a rolling release like Solus.

So I'mma just roll with KDE during games and GNOME for everything else!

Brucehankins

hsmenon I think Solus KDE may just change your mind about Plasma. I know it did for me. I couldn't get it, too many configurations for everything and everything setting option had 20 different sub-options. Tried it with Kubuntu, SUSE, and Garuda. I thought Garuda was really nicely themed, so I thought I'd give Solus KDE another shot. The base settings are wonderful, and it was much more approachable than any other distro out of the box on Plasma. So I added beauty line icons, Orchis Dark, Sweet, and themed it to my liking and haven't looked back.

Garuda LXQt Kwin also got me used to the idea of a tiling window manager, and I've been running Kwin on my Solus Plasma recently too and love it.

hsmenon

Yup, had to learn the hard way not that KDE does not work with any other other DE on Solus! Now I have a bunch of KDE Apps that I need to get rid off. KDE Booted up first then just vanished with no DE and then when I open GNOME, it just has elements of KDE all around it. I now have a Frankenstein cross of KDE and GNOME on solus.

Lucien_Lachance

hsmenon run eopkg hs
find the entry to which you want to roll back (the last one before the kde install), say #71
then run sudo eopkg hs -t 71 (replace 71 with whatever number)
and all changes made after 71 will be reverted

hsmenon

Lucien_Lachance Thank You, but I just did
sudo eopkg remove -c desktop.kde
sudo eopkg remove -c desktop.kde.core
and it seems to have restored things as it were.

I guess I have no option but to follow your instructions and watch out for the updates until someone fixes the bug. I don't want to deal with apt even though I love Debian stability so much!