forked from unom/punktfunk
enricobuehlerandClaude Fable 5
0323158a3e
A freshly spawned headless gamescope never delivered a single PipeWire buffer when a game was launched: gamescope only composites (and only on a composite pushes a capture buffer) when a client paints, and a nested Steam bootstrap paints nothing until its UI's first frame — far longer than the 10 s first-frame budget. The native plane's retry ladder then killed the half-booted Steam on every attempt and started from zero; the GameStream plane died on its single wait. Reused live displays worked, which pointed away from the real cause (root-caused on .41 with a raw pw_stream probe: `sleep infinity` nested → 0 buffers ever, `vkcube` nested → 60/s immediately). Every bare spawn now backgrounds the host's own splash client (`gamescope-splash`, hidden subcommand) beside the nested app: a dark window with a subtle breathing bar painted at ~2.5 Hz — damage from the first second, so capture gets its first frame within the budget on both planes. In `--steam` mode gamescope composites only windows whose appid is in the root `GAMESCOPECTRL_BASELAYER_APPID` list (live-proven: even a painting vkcube gets zero composites without it), so the splash declares itself as the Steam UI (STEAM_GAME=769) and seeds the baselayer iff unset; Steam's own rewrite at game launch hands composite focus to the game with no action on our side. PUNKTFUNK_GAMESCOPE_SPLASH=0 is the escape hatch. The dedicated Steam launch is also shaped with `-gamepadui` instead of `-silent`: the nested Steam is Big Picture — the identity gamescope's `--steam` integration is built around — so the boot shows the gamepad UI instead of the desktop client window flashing through the stream, and gamescope's focus rules (game outranks the Steam UI appid) cover what `-silent` was working around. On-glass on .41 (Bazzite, RTX 5070 Ti, gamescope c31743d): cold connect + Balatro launch delivers frames on the first attempt on both a cold and a torn-down-then-fresh spawn; Big Picture boot → game handover confirmed. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>