Cannot get a single game working on Linux

burgersc12, 5 months ago

Imo distro doesn’t matter very much. Your best bet is to try either Lutris or Bottles in order to manage your games easier. Then you just need to install dependencies and the games should work. If not, try other wine versions, proton, proton-ge etc

BolexForSoup, 5 months ago

Ehhh I wouldn’t go that far. Some distros have way more compatibility with games out the box than others. It’s not just about what can technically be made to run, it’s also about how much futzing around you have to do.

burgersc12, 5 months ago

Thats true, but at the end of the day most distros are just Debian with extra steps.

Fal, 5 months ago

Imo distro doesn’t matter very much.

Except that they’re on Ubuntu 22.04. which is totally ancient at this point

burgersc12, 5 months ago

Oh, didnt realize they were running something as old as the LTS release? How will he ever make it work?? If only there was a way to update software…

Fal, 5 months ago

Yeah, start adding PPAs or installing software from source. That’s much more likely to make things work for a beginner

burgersc12, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Or he could just update to the latest version if its that big a deal? Why would he go through the whole PPA shit when it takes very little effort to get an updated version of Ubuntu on a flash drive to reinstall

Fal, 5 months ago

I’m confused what your argument is. That the ancient LTS version isn’t a problem because he an just wipe and reinstall a new version?

burgersc12, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Why is it a problem? Its very easy to install a new distro (which i still do not see as being necessary). Why are you acting like he needs to be on the absolute latest software? Bet it fixes exactly none of the issues hes been facing

Fal, 5 months ago

Because

1. these types of issues are often related to drivers and kernel bugs. So being on an ancient version that has ancient versions of the kernel and drivers is just stupid
2. unless he has a staging server that he has set up to test the distro upgrades, it does absolutely no service to choose a non-rolling release distro

burgersc12, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

1. He has ancient hardware also isn’t 22.04 from within the last year and a half?
2. Why does it matter to the average gamer? I bet it makes no real world difference whether you’re on 23.1 or 22.04 unless you absolutely need the latest software

LoopDigger, 5 months ago

Try setting proton to version 7 in steam. I had a similar issue and it was down to having an older gpu that wasn’t compatible with stuff the newer proton releases were doing.

LoopDigger, 5 months ago

Oh yeah, I also had to change the nvidia driver to the legacy version. Yes, my computer is ancient.

MrKurteous, 5 months ago

Ah, Proton 7 didn’t seem to help, but I haven’t tried using older drivers yet, I should probably try that next! Thanks!

fedev, 5 months ago

Check the documentation to see which driver supports your hardware before trying.

Once you have the correct driver, test to see if it is working properly, there are a few commands to do this.

EdgeRunner, 5 months ago

Is it a laptop ?

MrKurteous, 5 months ago

It’s a desktop! Dual-booted

EdgeRunner, 5 months ago

Arfff, just in case, can you paste the response of this command :

• xrandr --listproviders

Maybe you have an GPU chipset on the edge, and if that’s the case you will need to tell to the system to use the PCI Gpu

Montagge, 5 months ago

Also make sure the steam Linux runtimes are installed

tok3n, 5 months ago

Are you on X11 or Wayland? Steam has crap support for Wayland

tal, 5 months ago

Works fine in Wayland here.

Limitless_screaming, 5 months ago

Does Steam even have any support for Wayland? There's maybe one dialogue window that runs under native Wayland, and the rest of the UI uses XWayland. I've been running the few games I played under XWayland and they work just fine on KDE Plasma / Manjaro.

scutiger, 5 months ago

By default, I don’t think so, but you can install gamescope and that supports Wayland.

Limitless_screaming, 5 months ago

Gamescope is just a Wayland compositor. It's like switching from Gnome to Plasma (or Mutter to KWin), I don't think that would matter to Steam.

Squiddles, 5 months ago

I've never had any issues on Hyprland. The Steam Deck also uses Wayland (Gamescope). Not saying there can't be cases where unique bugs happen on Wayland, and maybe there's something else I don't know about, but Steam Wayland support seems to be fine as far as I can tell.

sugar_in_your_tea, 5 months ago

Works fine for me on GNOME, but it could have issues on other desktop environments.

Montagge, 5 months ago

What format is your hard drive or drives? Ext4?

shaka, 5 months ago

This is important, if your games are installed in a drive formatted in NTFS you will have problems with Proton/Wine/etc. One way to discover the issue is to run Steam from terminal and it will tell you the details in an error message

Zaphod, 5 months ago

The games can be installed on an NTFS drive, but the compatdata has to be on EXT4 (or some other well supported file system for Linux)

MrKurteous, 5 months ago

Yeah, my Linux partition is Ext4! I have dual-booted my computer since I didn’t trust myself to get Ubuntu up and running quickly, haha.

shaka, 5 months ago

But are your games installed in the Ext4 partition? See my other reply from before.

p5f20w18k, 5 months ago

Make sure you don’t have “amdvlk” installed rather than lib32-nvidia-utils

wiki.archlinux.org/title/Vulkan

Arch wiki might not have correct details of package names for Ubuntu, but it’ll put you on the right track.

Bustedknuckles, 5 months ago

I’m no help here, but I have been thinking strongly of converting an old windows box to Linux gaming with steam, so I’m hoping someone can help OP and I can pretroubleshoot my own transition. Steam has their own debian-based OS, right? I was planning on falling back to that if proton didn’t work

five82, 5 months ago

The original SteamOS was based on Debian. But that’s been unmaintained for years. Don’t use it.

SteamOS 3.5 is currently available for the Steam Deck only and is based on Arch Linux. Valve plans on generally releasing it but they haven’t yet.

The latest Debian or Ubuntu should work fine.

sugar_in_your_tea, 5 months ago

I don’t know if they support the OG Steam OS anymore, and if they do, it’s not going to be a good experience for regular desktop use. Steam Deck is Arch based, and I think there’s where their efforts are going these days.

That said, if you want something with a nice out of the box experience for gaming, consider Nobara Linux. It’s based on Fedora and maintained by the person who does the Proton-GE releases (Glorious Eggroll), which have fixed that aren’t in the official Steam Proton releases (e.g. fixes for specific games that haven’t landed yet). It should be a pretty good experience.

However, just installing Mint Debian edition should work fine, you’ll just need to make sure you get the right drivers and that’s about it.

ben329, 5 months ago

@Bustedknuckles @MrKurteous
Bazzite gpu nvidia

Chimera os gpu amd

stargazingpenguin, 5 months ago

Unless you’re trying to play multiplayer games with incompatible anticheat you’ll most likely be just fine. There are obviously edge cases, like OP, where something is just not working right, but I gamed on Linux for hundreds of hours last year with basically no issues at all.