Plugging In eGPU Freezes Bazzite

[Mallowwww]

Describe the bug

On both the deck and desktop version of Bazzite, plugging in my RX 7600XT AMD GPU slows the computer down and freezes it after a couple seconds. If I leave it like that for too long, it no longer responds to input, even if I unplug the eGPU, forcing me to hard reset my laptop.

As well, if I boot the laptop with the GPU plugged in, it will hang at either the LENOVO logo or a single underscore in the top left.

I am using the internal display of the laptop (Lenovo Yoga 9i) which has a 4k HDR screen. I realize that I am sacrificing performance by doing so rather than using an external display, but when I was using Windows, the performance hit was more on the tens of FPS, rather than completely freezing my computer. I feel like this is an AMD driver issue, but I cannot manually install new drivers because they always throw an error saying they are incompatible with Bazzite. As well, I think the read-only nature of the OS would prevent them from installing anyway.

What did you expect to happen?

I expected the graphics to switch over to the AMD GPU when plugging in via thunderbolt, and kicking off the internal graphics of my CPU.

Output of rpm-ostree status

ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/bazzite:stable
                   Digest: sha256:ec2acb497225c8686e0c9814b2c5f2afaf3310bc57437d8f25e584d828f37b78
                  Version: 41.20250106.1 (2025-01-06T14:13:18Z)

  ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/bazzite:stable
                   Digest: sha256:ec2acb497225c8686e0c9814b2c5f2afaf3310bc57437d8f25e584d828f37b78
                  Version: 41.20250106.1 (2025-01-06T14:13:18Z)

Hardware

Laptop:
LENOVO Yoga 9 14ITL5
Mesa Intel® Xe Graphics
15.2 GiB of RAM
8 × 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-1195G7 @ 2.90GHz

GPU:
Nitro AMD RX 7600XT

Extra information or context

I have tried this on fresh installs of both versions of Bazzite, each having the same issue. I have tried using all-ways-egpu, but obviously the computer is unusable while the setup can see the GPU, so I cannot set it as the primary to do any of the methods. My laptop bios does not have any options for thunderbolt aside from enabling/disabling it.

[Mallowwww]

After doing some tests with other distros and reading abt the problem, I think this may be a wider AMD driver issue. However, I feel like eGPUs should be a standard feature for an OS centered around gaming on deck-like devices, and so Bazzite should have a fix for it. I believe the issue stems from using the built-in display. If this can't be fixed on a distro level, what are we supposed to do? This works perfectly fine on Windows.

I tried to use journalctl to look at what's happening when it crashes, but it crashes at a different point in the gpu setup each time, and never has an error related to it. It just stops mid-setup.

I notice that if I unplug it as soon as it freezes, it will recover (yielding only errors about losing connection to the gpu), but after about 5 seconds of being plugged in, nothing I do can make it responsive and I have to hard reboot. I checked htop while it was running, but it only shows a spike after I unplug the gpu.

[Mallowwww]

Ubuntu does not have this problem; just ran some tests