this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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Games freezing when alt-tabbing. Where do I even being debugging? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 days ago by Kelbesq@lemmy.ml to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
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I've had a problem in several games, and I don't really no where to to being debugging it. It's not like there is any error message. Is it my DE? my distro? drivers? proton? the game engine itself?

I've done some basic web searches, and all of the answers are hyper specific, or "alt-tab just breaks some times".

The actual problem: When I alt-tab, some games will appear to freeze when I tab back in. I've noticed that while I am holding alt-tab and have a non-game window selected, the game is not frozen. As long as have not selected the window I am trying to swap to, it keeps running. It's almost as if the game has inverted it's internal state of whether it's in the foreground are not.

(if it does matter, I am using Gnome on 22.04 PopOS, Nvidia 565 driver, Steam/Proton).

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[–] Sunny@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Does this happen when running the game in fullscreen mode aswell as in bordless? AFAIK, when u launch a game in fullscreen more resources are given to this specific resource/game. Therefore, when trying to switch windows/tabs the system will hang more easily as it takes more computing to load the desktop again.

Take this with a grain of salt I'm no expert. Would also be interesting to see what specs your computer is running. Personally used to have these sort of issues back when I had games running in an HDD, but since moving to SSDs+new higher specs its not really an issue anymore.

[–] Kelbesq@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago

From my many decades of windows gaming, I always run in borderless window mode if I think I need/want to tab out.

I'm running on a laptop, but it's fairly high end: 13th gen i9, 4070, 64GB of RAM, and only a SSD.