I will be honest, I just gave up. I couldn't get consistent performance on HellDivers 2. Many of the things you have mentioned I've tried and found they don't make much of a difference or made things worse.

I did get it running nice for about a day and then an update was pushed and it ran like rubbish again. The game runs smoothly when initially running the map and then massive dip in frames for several seconds. This is usually when one of the bugs is jumping at you.

This game may work better on Fedora/Bazzite or <some other distro> but I find Debian to be super reliable and don't want to switch distro. I also don't like Fedora generally as I've found it unreliable in the past. I had a look at Bazzite and I honestly just wasn't interested. This is due to it having a bunch of technologies that I have no interest in using.

There are other issues that are tangential but related issues.

e.g.

I normally play on Super HellDive with other players in a Discord VC. Discord / Pipewire seems to reset my sound for no particular reason and my Plantronics Headset Mic (good headset, not some gamer nonsense) will be not found. This requires a restart of pipewire/wireplumber and Discord (in that order). This happens often enough I have a shell script alias called "fix_discord".

I have weird audio problems on HDMI (AMD card) thanks to a regression in the kernel (Kernel 6.1 with Debian worked fine).

I could mess about with this for ages and maybe get it working or just reboot into Windows which takes me all of a minute.

It is just easier to use Windows for Gaming. Then use Linux for work stuff.

I used Debian for about 15 years.

Honestly? Fedora is really the premier Linux distro these days. It's where the most the development is happening, by far.

All of my hardware, some old, some brand new (AMD card), worked flawlessly out of the box.

There was a point when you couldn't get me to use an rpm-based distro if my life depended on it. That time is long gone.

I don't want to use Fedora. Other than I've found it unreliable I switched to Debian because I was fed up of all the Window-isms/Corporate stuff in the distro that was enabled by default that I was trying to get away from.

It the same reason I don't want to use Bazzite. It misses the point of using a Linux/Unix system altogether.

I also learned a long time ago Distro Hopping doesn't actually fix your issues. You just end up either with the same issues or different ones. If I switched from Debian to Fedora, I suspect I would have many of the same issues.

e.g. If a issue is in the Linux kernel itself such as HDMI Audio on AMD cards having random noise, I fail to see how changing from one distro to another would help. Fedora might have a custom patch to fix this, however I could also take this patch and make my own kernel image (which I've done in the past btw).

The reality is that most people doing development for various project / packages that make the Linux desktop don't have the setup I have and some of the peculiarities I am running into. If I had a more standard setup, I wouldn't have an issue.

Moreover, I would be using FreeBSD/OpenBSD or some other more traditional Unix system and ditch Linux if I didn't require some Linux specific applications. I am considering moving to something like Artix / Devuan in the future if I did decide to switch.

Hey, were you using KDE/Plasma, by chance?

I just switched over to it last night and my audio in Helldivers 2 in particular is awful and I'm having framerate dives.

If I got back to Gnome3, it's much more stable in fps and my audio problems go away.

This is with VRR on/off in both.