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)
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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.
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!
Make sure you have both your nvidia drivers and vulkan installed. Your errors point to a missing vulkan.
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!
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.
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.
I don’t like using Lutris. I have needed to modify the script for every single game but one.
I vastly prefer Bottles.I love Bottles. When in doubt, that always works.
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
It should normally just work, I reccomend nobara it got it’s 39th relase yesterday and it is THE gaming distro
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.
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
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Is it a laptop ?
It’s a desktop! Dual-booted
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
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.
Oh yeah, I also had to change the nvidia driver to the legacy version. Yes, my computer is ancient.
Ah, Proton 7 didn’t seem to help, but I haven’t tried using older drivers yet, I should probably try that next! Thanks!
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.
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.
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.
What format is your hard drive or drives? Ext4?
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.
But are your games installed in the Ext4 partition? See my other reply from before.
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
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
@Bustedknuckles @MrKurteous
Bazzite gpu nvidiaChimera os gpu amd
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
Imo distro doesn’t matter very much.
Except that they’re on Ubuntu 22.04. which is totally ancient at this point
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…
Yeah, start adding PPAs or installing software from source. That’s much more likely to make things work for a beginner
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
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?
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
Because
- 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
- 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
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.
