As others have said, it might be the new steam recording feature being a touch buggy still. You could also try running the game through gamescope. I’ve had that resolve weird stuttering when game frame pacing wasn’t matching up with the refresh rate of the monitor or compositor properly.

Absolutely this. Relatively quick and clean, no messing with installation or reconfiguration. That is, assuming your data isn’t completely corrupted and the old drive doesn’t just outright fail during transfer… But if that happens you were screwed to begin with.

If you’re gaming you might as well just jump on Bazzite if you’re already interested in Kinoite. Very similar base, but Bazzite has some extras Kinoite doesn’t and it makes a transition into an immutable distro easier.

Software-wise, it seems that the relatively fast adoption of flatpaks and other containerized formats somewhat solves the typical dependency hell that was so common in Linux just a few years back (and to some extent still is an issue today depending on your distro and use case). The hardware support side is a little harder. That’s going to be up to vendors to play nice with the Kernel team and/or introduce reasonable userland software that doesn’t break the golden rule. Until Linux gets more market share the latter isn’t likely to happen. A nice side benefit of the emergence of immutable and/or atomic distros is that users can play around and try things with much lower risk of bricking their systems, so I’d also consider that a step closer in the “it just works” department.

Even with nvme drives which supposedly “don’t need” to use BFQ, I STILL always swap it since it maintains responsiveness across the system during heavy IO loads. I used to have similar full system freezes when downloading steam games which notoriously overload your IO in Linux. BFQ was the solution every single time.

Edit Try following the instructions detailed in this post to add a systemd rule to set the scheduler: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1009577/selecting-a-linux-i-o-scheduler

The second answer that shows an actual rules.d file example has always worked for me. If using nvme or old school spinning rust you’ll need to change it up a bit. Instead of “noop” set it to “BFQ”.

Try swapping to BFQ io scheduler and see if that makes a difference.

I’m going to assume it’s not Universal Blue… But parts of your description reminded me of it.

I have personal experience with BTRFS and Windows. And that experience is that it’s roughly as stable/complete as NTFS is for Linux. 6 of one and a half dozen the other. I can’t recommend either situation for guaranteed stability long term between systems if one really needs to swap between the OS’s frequently while accessing all the same files.

I can vouch for Bazzite. Been running it on my desktop and laptop (both amd gpu’s) with virtually no issues or hiccups. The desktop is even dual boot, despite that not being advised.