Cannot get a single game working on Linux

BananaTrifleViolin, 5 months ago

You may have the GPU drivers installed but are they active? Look in "Software & Updates" on the Additional Drivers tab and see which drivers are active.

Installing the drivers is not enough, you have to select them to use them too.

If the latest drivers are active then you may need to think about switching to a legacy version (you have a pretty old CPU and GPU by current standards; newest drivers are not always best). You may also want to look at using older versions of Proton than the latest for similar reasons - there may be features and changes in newer versions that are just not going to work with your set up or your set up just isn't tested to work with.

BlanK0, 4 months ago

It could be the proton version, when i started gamming on linux with steam i used the custom proton GE from flatpak and it worked better then any version, nowadays the proton experimental also seems to be working even with more games supporting it but the custom version still has better performance in my machine.

WeLoveCastingSpellz, 4 months ago

It should normally just work, I reccomend nobara it got it’s 39th relase yesterday and it is THE gaming distro

Lemmyvisitor, 4 months ago

haven’t seen anyone else mention it, but league is currently broken on Linux. you can see the status on this page or r/leagueoflinux

leagueoflinux.gitlab.io/status/

Acidbath, 4 months ago

I think it has been fixed(atleast for me) recently with ge-proton8-27-lol.

Defaced, 5 months ago

As others have said use the Pop_OS! Nvidia ISO. Nvidia drivers are just problematic on Linux. There’s a good chance your games will just work with that OS. It’s also based off Ubuntu, so it has access to the same software repositories.

Commiunism, 5 months ago

I haven’t used Ubuntu, but I had a similar setup to yours in the past, and on Archlinux I couldn’t run any game until I installed 32 bit nvidia drivers (on arch the package was named lib32-nvidia-utils), and that’s my first instinct - maybe you don’t have 32 bit drivers installed?

Now, as I haven’t used Ubuntu much I’m just going off of online reference so there commands might not be 100% correct, but try doing this:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 to add 32-bit app support

sudo apt install -y libvulkan1 libvulkan1:i386 to install the vulkan drivers, including the 32 bit one. I’m not sure if this will have the same effect as lib32-nvidia-utils package on Arch though or if it does the same thing, but hopefully it works.

As for League, it does work on Linux quite well, but the installation is a little bit unusual. The gameplay though is literally the same as on Windows, no performance loss there at least in my experience.

jjlinux, 5 months ago

In cases like this, because of the simplicity, I suggest installing PopOS! Nvidia ISO. Chances are, with that hardware, that it will just work. Good luck bud.

olafurp, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Sounds like a driver Nvidia driver issue. Have you tried running a natively supported game like Counter Strike?

See if you can update/install the nvidia proprietary drivers and see if anything works.

See also if there’s a recommended diagnostics program to see if you can get more clues if the above doesn’t work.

MrKurteous, 5 months ago

I haven’t tried a natively supported game, I’ll go ahead and see if I can do that.

I have tried updating the Nvidia drivers. I’m not sure I understand what you mean by recommended diagnostics problem? Thank you for the tips!

olafurp, 5 months ago

Diagnostic program *

Sorry, autocorrect.

angrymouse, 5 months ago

Try run steam from terminal, it will show more logs about the error, this is my best advice for now since I don’t use Nvidia for a while.

MrKurteous, 5 months ago

Ah it did indeed show much more info! I could pick out two things that seemed like error messages, I’ll search the internet for them later but gotta run for Christmas celebration in a minute.

When starting Steam it told me “unable to init and enumerate GPUs with Vulkan” and “BInit - unable to initialize Vulkan!”, which sounds potentially serious.

On trying to start the games (and maybe at other occasions too) it told me

Glib-GIO-CRITICAL **: g_setting_schema_source_lookup: assertion ‘source != NULL’ failed

I’ll look into them when I get the time, but I wanted to write them here anyway for completeness. Thank you for your help!

shadoh, 5 months ago

Based on that Id say the Nvidia driver is not working or installed. As others have mentioned PopOs has a setup with nvidia already installed, otherwise will be worth googling it for your specific distro. Good luck!

eldain, 5 months ago

Make sure you have both your nvidia drivers and vulkan installed. Your errors point to a missing vulkan.

linuxconfig.org/install-and-test-vulkan-on-linux

wingsfortheirsmiles, 5 months ago

I started using Pop OS at the start of the year and have managed to play the vast majority of games including Baldur’s Gate 3. My hardware was similar to yours (though I’ve recently upgraded): 3700X, 1080Ti. Downloaded the version of Pop with the Nvidia drivers and ensured Steam Play was enabled for all games (to automatically utilise Proton).

I’d suggest trying the other Nvidia driver versions, as one of the other ones might work better with your 1070. Seem to recall I accidentally switched to one of the other versions Pop offers and had issues so maybe playing around with them will get some games working

sodalite, 5 months ago

There are still a lot of games that don’t work for me, even with Proton on Steam. Lutris has just straight up never worked for anything. Managed to get some going with the Heroic Games launcher, but not all. I think it’s either a DirectX problem or something with the drivers. I’m not nearly techie enough to know how to even approach solving the problem, just maybe identifying it. I hope you figure it out so we can all get to playing our favorite games.

Montagge, 5 months ago

I don't like using Lutris. I have needed to modify the script for every single game but one.
I vastly prefer Bottles.

sodalite, 5 months ago

I love Bottles. When in doubt, that always works.

CarlosCheddar, 5 months ago

I’ve played most of those games on Linux and they work out of the box on my EndeavorOS setup with AMD. You may be missing some drivers or libraries specific to your setup.

LunchEnjoyer, 5 months ago

That’s odd, I installed Nobara as my OS and almost any game is just install and click play and it plays flawlessly. Using both steam to install and Heroic Launcher (which you could try) that has the capabilities to get the games you have on GOG, Epic and Amazon Prime*. Don’t forget that in steam you need to enable Linux/Proton in settings.

Otherwise ProtonDB is a great resource to see what games run on Linux, how well they run and how each person ran the game.

www.protondb.com

Edit: I do believe getting a dedicated gaming distro does help as it has a lot of necessary tweaks pre-configured. For that I’d recommend, Nobara, Garuda or PopOS!

MrKurteous, 5 months ago

ProtonDB is great, I did look at it which is why I expected to be able to run those games! Even people on protonDB that had to tinker to get it working seemed to at least be able to start the games, so I couldn’t find anyone with problems matching my case. Thanks for the tip though! If I don’t manage to figure it out with all help in this thread I might try one of the gaming distros :)

RiderExMachina, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

There are a lot of interesting things in your post.

First, League typically doesn’t work well on Linux because Riot doesn’t care about Linux users. If League is going to be a deal breaker, I’d recommend getting a dedicated Windows system for the best time.

Second, your CPU has a known hardware bug with C-states. If you’ve been noticing your computer freeze often under Linux, disable C-states in your BIOS.

Third, are the games you’re trying to launch purchased through Steam, purchased through a different store, or pirated?

Are you able to play any of your games, or is it just these few that have been giving you trouble? If it’s every game, you may not have the nvidia driver or vulkan installed. Just to be sure, you can try running nvidia-smi in a terminal, which will show you which driver the system is using. If you are unable to run the command at all, you’ll definitely need to install the nvidia driver

potajito, 5 months ago

As of today at least, lol is working using wine-ge (there is explicitly a version for lol)

MrKurteous, 5 months ago

I’ve heard that League is usually problematic on Linux, but it’s not a deal breaker, my computer is dual booted anyway so I could always play it on Windows.

All the games, League aside, are purchased through Steam. I have only tried these games I mention, since they are the only games I’ve been playing since I set up my Linux partition, but since not a single one of them worked at all I have assumed that’s it’s probably not the games that are the problem.

Nvidia-smi confirms I’m using 545.29.06. About Vulkan though, i l noticed now that when I launch Steam through the terminal it says “unable to enumerate GPUs with Vulkan” and “Unable to initialize Vulkan”. Could maybe that be the source of the issue then? Thanks a lot for your help either way!

Linus_Torvalds, 5 months ago

League is actually working fine, it just had a bug last month. I’ve been playing for 2 years on Linux exclusively and it was unplayable for max 2 weeks.

hperrin, 5 months ago

One thing that would be good to check is to make sure the Nvidia proprietary driver is actually controlling your video card.

Run

<span style="color:#323232;">sudo lshw -c video
</span>

in the terminal, and make sure that under “configuration” you see “driver=nvidia” and not “driver=nouveau”.

Also make sure there’s only one entry that comes up. I’m pretty sure your CPU doesn’t have an iGPU, but good to make sure.

MrKurteous, 5 months ago

Thanks, it indeed says driver=nvidia!