Solved

It's the GPU hardware that was the problem 😭. This post can be closed.

Credit to Clearwater who figured out the real issue early on.

I never had good luck with bazzite so, only thing I can offer as an advise would be to get cachyOS or Nobara if gaming is the main purpose.

For the pstate issue, I saw some comments stating that your mainboard firmware may be too old. Try updating your firmware (bios) and then reinstall if you still cannot get it working.

From my experience Bazzite is the easiest to use system for gaming on Linux, but I can't install it.

I tested Garuda, but even the Mokka edition I know my friend won't like the aesthetic of, and although it works, for some reason on my monitor it only shows 720p resolution - I don't know why. It even makes the bios go into 720p when it's otherwise fine. But that could be because I have a 2k monitor.

I was going to gift them the PC tomorrow since they leave the country for December, so also running out of time. Willing to try other gaming focused systems too.

Ok so, intel gathering:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=305924

Same error for an Arch user, who says (about his HW and situation):

It's AMD Ryzen 5 5500U with Radeon Graphics (Integrated), HP Laptop 15-ef2126wm. I have to use IOMMU, otherwise sleep doesn't work (It get stuck after waking up from sleep, s2idle)

https://discuss.cachyos.org/t/amd-pstate-failed-to-register-with-return-19/8214/8

Same amd_pstate 19 error, this time in Cachy OS

Just ran into this same situation on the same chipset but different board, an Asrock A520M-DHV, but the issue is the same. The latest BIOS from 2025 breaks AMD CPPC and results in both the errors the OP posted as well as no amd_pstate governing (higher core usage, more heat/power, etc.) Downgrading to the last BIOS from 2024 (version 3.52) fixes the issue.

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/amd-pstate-driver-steps-and-discussion.118873/

This may also be relevant.

So... so far, my guess would be that your motherboard firmware and/or BIOS/UEFI config are having some kind of problem, and maybe possibly it is specific down to either or both the IOMMU and CPPC systems.

Maybe you can try checking the setting for CPPC? If it is toggled off, try turning it on?

It seems like this error has been a recurring issue amongst varying systems and varying kinds of Linux... I am not sure from what you've written if this is only happening to you with Bazzite...

... but uh, yeah, it looks like just a lot of MoBos have been having trouble with specifically the AMD CPPC part of their firmware, when running seemingly any kind of Linux.

I don't know if this is very helpful or not, but maybe narrowing down to either CPPC or IOMMU could be an idea?

It at least does make sense that you're getting hard crashes with graphical glitches, even without a gui... if the CPU itself is fundamentally locking up and being unable to execute commands, that would fit, I would think, with CPPC or IOMMU systems being the culprit.

Does it need to be Bazzite? That was my first choice too when I left Win11 earlier this month, but couldn’t get a USB install stick to boot. Ended up going with Fedora because it was the only distro that booted up without issue.

Do I get that right, you do manage to install it and then it does this? If so, try installing Nvidia drivers per hand, and try various versions, nvidia drivers are usually the culprit and they keep releasing faulty driver versions

edit: how does it look when you boot with x11 or with software rendering?

amd_pstate indicates to me this might be a bios issue. Make sure the bios is the latest version and enable CPPC in your bios settings (if you have it) and see if that fixes it.

Reading into the logs you provided (see the pastes), I see an ungodly number of kernel: NVRM: gpuHandleSanityCheckRegReadError_GM107: Possible bad register read: addr: 0x110100, regvalue: 0xbadf5620, error code: Unknown SYS_PRI_ERROR_CODE lines followed by some messages about the GPU failing to initialize.

If you have another Nvidia card available (16xx or above), swap it into the system and see if it suddenly works. Your card may be a dud.

Odds are that pstate is entirely unrelated.

A search on "amd pstate -19" didn't return any bazzite specific answers but have me a few hits on other distros like Arch and Cachy.

General consensus looks like upgrade or downgrade your BIOS.

You can try Nobara with nvidia ISO and boot into the live environment and diagnose any issues, like by running nvidia-smi to see if your GPU is working as intended. Nobara is also based on Fedora, but simple, non-silverblue, non-atomic OS.

If everything works as expected then there might be some compatibility issues with Bazzite. If so, then I would recommend sticking to Nobara. It is not the most stable OS, but you get almost every feature Bazzite has to offer. Also, Nobara is maintained by Glorious Eggroll, who also maintains a popular fork of proton, called proton-ge.

Another thing I would like to mention is that I also bought a used 3060, recently, and faced some graphical glitches. I also bought a new PSU, and it had 2 6-pin connectors and one of them gave me those issues. Plugging in the other one solved it. I doubt if it was a PSU problem since it was new and rated Silver.

Concur with the others - in an arch forum they advise that specific error indicates the installed BIOS is too old

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=301797

Thanks everyone, will try updating the bios and see if that works. I really hope it does .

Edit: Didn't work. Same error. Didn't have high hopes since when I looked, I saw the bios firmware wasn't too old - January 2025 - but yeah... I'm not sure what else to try next...

Jump on the Discourse if possible. https://universal-blue.discourse.group/c/bazzite/5

Looking through those centos logs it's an Nividia firmware issue linked with their open-drivers

1. Clear any layered packages sudo rpm-ostree reset
2. Rebase to the non-open NVIDIA image

sudo rpm-ostree rebase ostree-unverified-registry:ghcr.io/ublue-os/bazzite-nvidia:stable

sudo reboot

Failing that and the fact you don't have a lot of time I would take the suggestions of just popping Mint, PopOS, CachyOS(you said no arch, but I've had good reliability), PikaOS small team Debian variant of the Linux gaming distros. Give your self a way to be able to jump remotely with their consent like Rustdesk, Tailsacle+Remmina or Teamviewer.

Other immutable/atomics Vanilla OS

NixOS (my current distro and if you're into making and maintaining for friends a great option as you can just make the gaming distro you want and distrubute it to them.)

GLF (French gaming distro based on Nix, I steal their configs for my gaming.nix :D)

Solved

It's the GPU hardware that was the problem 😭. This post can be closed.

Credit to Clearwater who figured out the real issue early on.

From my experience Bazzite is the easiest to use system for gaming on Linux, but I can't install it.

I tested Garuda, but even the Mokka edition I know my friend won't like the aesthetic of, and although it works, for some reason on my monitor it only shows 720p resolution - I don't know why. It even makes the bios go into 720p when it's otherwise fine. But that could be because I have a 2k monitor.

I was going to gift them the PC tomorrow since they leave the country for December, so also running out of time. Willing to try other gaming focused systems too that are very beginner friendly (so no arch recommendations I think - and ideally something immutable)