I recently made the switch to Linux Mint with a partition on my laptop. For work, it has been quite nice, but gaming has been incredibly difficult. I only managed to get one game to run seemingly without issue, which was Factorio, but any other game, Linux native or otherwise, has been an absolute headache to play, if it even runs at all. I’m using Proton and Protondb, but nothing seems to really work. While I’m willing to put in some work to get my games to run, I don’t know how to figure out what is wrong and what I need to do to fix them.
So, how do I go about fixing this sort of stuff? My method of trying every single version of Proton with various recommended settings/commands from Protondb has not yielded anything beneficial. Additionally, searching the web with errors has also not yielded any meaningful results. For now, my solution is to switch back to windows if I want to play anything other than Factorio.
Thanks for the help.
My best guess is that you have an GPU that either doesn’t support Vulkan, or has driver issues. But we shouldn’t guess, that’s what logs are for.
For Steam logs, running Steam from terminal as suggested is one way. Do note that error with wrong ELF class for game overlay library when starting any game is normal, since Steam tries to load both 32 and 64 for bit version for each game, and the wrong one will always fail. Arch wiki has more information.
The issue might be with Vulkan, but I’ll check to make sure. Whenever I try to play Black Mesa, it always needs to load Vulkan, despite others saying it only needs to happen once. I’ll adjust the Proton logs and use the terminal output for Steam as well and see if I can find the problem(s). Thanks for the help
My best guess is that you have an GPU that either doesn’t support Vulkan, or has driver issues. But we shouldn’t guess, that’s what logs are for.
For Steam logs, running Steam from terminal as suggested is one way. Do note that error with wrong ELF class for game overlay library when starting any game is normal, since Steam tries to load both 32 and 64 for bit version for each game, and the wrong one will always fail. Arch wiki has more information.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Steam/Troubleshooting#Debugging_Steam
For Proton logs, set environment variable PROTON_LOG=1. You can do it in Steam launch options, see Proton Readme for more info.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton?tab=readme-ov-file#runtime-config-options
With hardware and firmware issues system logs often point to right direction. Again Arch wiki has a good tutorial on it.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd/Journal#Filtering_output
Games often have their own logging too if you need to go there. You’ll need to look those up, as they vary by game.
I hope this helps.
The issue might be with Vulkan, but I’ll check to make sure. Whenever I try to play Black Mesa, it always needs to load Vulkan, despite others saying it only needs to happen once. I’ll adjust the Proton logs and use the terminal output for Steam as well and see if I can find the problem(s). Thanks for the help