Back in March I upgraded Pop OS and after that, weird performance problems started popping up. When trying to play Proton games, weird performance spikes started appearing, frame times were all over the place. This affected also regular software run using Wine, I got audio stuttering with Guitar Pro. I reinstalled Nvidia's drivers and even downgraded the kernel, but nope. I tried all kinds of performance tweaks, but nope.

Then I looked at udevadm's logs, and my computer's 20-year-old DVD drive appeared far too often. I shut down my computer, removed the drive and BAM – all those performance problems disappeared! Even Pop OS booted a lot faster! As the drive is connected through an IDE-SATA adapter, it may have created constant messages to the OS, even if it wasn't in use. That in turn strained the system.

Now I can finally game on my PC again and use Guitar Pro, feels as if a world is opened again.