11 mo. ago • 94%

Cannot get a single game working on Linux

Hey all!

So I've been wanting to get into Linux gaming for a while thanks to inspiration from this community, but I've struggled to get it working, and after a final try today I'm starting to lose hope. I haven't gotten a single game working, most of them using Steam and Proton, but I also tried League of Legends through Lutris. I don't know what to try next, other than maybe installing a different Linux operating system and trying again. Anyone with some advice on what I can do, or where I can turn for help? I've searched online as best I can but didn't find anything that seemed relevant.

Some details of what I've tried if anyone is curious: on Steam I tried Trine 4 and Jusant today, previously also Baldur's Gate 3 a few months ago. The games simply don't launch, though for BG3 and LoL at least the launcher starts. Usually no error message, but Trine did for once tell me "GPU error detected" today. I've tried both Proton Experimental and whatever the newest version is at the time, today Proton GE-Proton8-14. Some system details:

Distro: Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS RAM: 16GB CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1600 six-core GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 GPU Driver: Nvidia 545.29.06 (proprietary)

62 comments

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

Run

sudo lshw -c video

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.
40
- Thanks, it indeed says driver=nvidia!
  
  8
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.

27
- Oh yeah, I also had to change the nvidia driver to the legacy version. Yes, my computer is ancient.
  
  10
  
  Ah, Proton 7 didn't seem to help, but I haven't tried using older drivers yet, I should probably try that next! Thanks!
  
  4
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.

16
- 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!
  
  2
  
  Diagnostic program *
  
  Sorry, autocorrect.
  
  2
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.

14
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.

12
- 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!
  
  5
  
  Make sure you have both your nvidia drivers and vulkan installed. Your errors point to a missing vulkan.
  
  https://linuxconfig.org/install-and-test-vulkan-on-linux
  
  8
  
  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!
  
  2
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

11
- Imo distro doesn't matter very much.
  
  Except that they're on Ubuntu 22.04. which is totally ancient at this point
  
  5
  
  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....
  
  -1
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.

11
Are you on X11 or Wayland? Steam has crap support for Wayland

11
- Works fine for me on GNOME, but it could have issues on other desktop environments.
  
  12
- 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.
  
  10
  
  Wayland plus Nvidia is a recipe for disaster. Steam deck is AMD
  
  1
- Works fine in Wayland here.
  
  3
- 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.
  
  2
  
  By default, I don't think so, but you can install gamescope and that supports Wayland.
  
  1
What format is your hard drive or drives? Ext4?

10
- 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
  
  4
  
  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)
  
  2
- 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.
  
  1
  
  But are your games installed in the Ext4 partition? See my other reply from before.
  
  2
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

8
- As of today at least, lol is working using wine-ge (there is explicitly a version for lol)
  
  8
- 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!
  
  5
  
  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.
  
  1
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

7
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.

https://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!

7
- 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 :)
  
  3
Make sure you don’t have “amdvlk” installed rather than lib32-nvidia-utils

https://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.

7
Is it a laptop ?

6
- It's a desktop! Dual-booted
  
  4
  
  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
  
  4
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.

4
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.

4
Also make sure the steam Linux runtimes are installed

3
It should normally just work, I reccomend nobara it got it's 39th relase yesterday and it is THE gaming distro

2
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

2
- 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.
  
  10
- 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.
  
  5
- 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.
  
  3
- @Bustedknuckles @MrKurteous
  Bazzite gpu nvidia
  
  Chimera os gpu amd
  
  3
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

https://leagueoflinux.gitlab.io/status/

1
- I think it has been fixed(atleast for me) recently with ge-proton8-27-lol.
  
  1
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.

1
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.

1
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.

0
- I don't like using Lutris. I have needed to modify the script for every single game but one.
  I vastly prefer Bottles.
  
  5
  
  I love Bottles. When in doubt, that always works.
  
  3

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