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 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
21 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Ah, interesting, glad you found a workaround at least.

That makes sense really, it highly suggests that the game has trouble passing keyboard control off to the operating system when using hotkeys that the game has available for gameplay, but since the Super key is handled only by the operating system, that doesn't confuse the game.

👍

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Good to know general knowledge. The game is clearly still running in the back ground when I swap workspaces, so no real chance for the it get confused.