Linux Gaming @lemmy.world RevolverUnit @lemmy.world 11mo ago

Most games installed on my main OS drive refuse to launch. Proton issue or something else?

It seems to mostly happen to 3D games, very rarely for 2D ones.

Normally, this wouldn't be much of an issue for me since I install everything to secondary SSDs anyways, but the one piece of software that is driving me up a wall is Steam VR, since its installation folder can't be moved.

I could find plenty of fixes when it came to the opposite problem (launching games from another drive) but nothing for my situation.

Any solutions or even just point me in the right direction where to start when it comes to troubleshooting something like this?

OS: Endeavour OS

GPU: RTX 2070 (latest Nvidia drivers)

CPU: Ryzen 2700X

Happens on both X11 and Wayland environments and everything is up-to-date

Edit: also this seems to happen with every version of Proton

11 comments

First step there would be to get some logs. Launch steam from a terminal and output to a file:

steam 2>&1 | tee steam.log

Launch a game and watch the terminal to see what happens.

If you moved games after launching them, clearing their Proton containers can help. I had some games set to extremely old Proton versions that couldn't launch because the version jump was too big. I've also seen vanilla wine prefixes break when moved due to some symlinks.

But those are guesses, the logs will tell you. Sometimes it even actually tells you how to fix it!
- Thank you, actually having a log to go through was very useful! Kinda. I managed to suss out that vkBasalt was having a config issue, which I eventually fixed. Now all my OS drive games seem to launch fine, except SteamVR (still).
  
  I was able to do a little more research with info from the log and I found out running SteamVR the usual way was broken. Launching Steam from /usr/lib/steam/ makes it...sorta work.
  
  Yeah, turns out it happened to be a separate issue from my initial problem, but with the same symptoms.
  
  Thanks for the closure. I was real curious about this one.
If something doesn't work on one drive and then magically works when you install it on another drive...

How is your drive formatted? Is it NTFS and not keeping the right Linux file permissions or something like that? It's been a decade since I had a Windows formatted drive, but I seem to remember there were issues using NTFS in Linux.
- EXT4. Huh, didn't realize installing a Linux OS into an NTFS formatted drive was even a thing
  
  I don't think you actually could put the OS on NTFS, it literally cannot store Linux file permissions and I have no idea how badly that's going to break the system.
  
  You certainly can use an NTFS drive for data storage in Linux but Windows has some default behaviors that make it hard to share that drive.
Just a thought, does the path to the games on your OS drive have a space anywhere in it? I remember a lot of old Windows games would throw a shit fit if they had a space anywhere
You 100% can move the folder. Copy it to whatever drive and symlink it in the original location.
Since that 545 drivers, I cannot play with Proton 8 at all. Open source drivers don't have this problem (their problem is performance), so it seems Nvidia f*cked up as usual. However first time hearing this. Can you play native games at least?
Can you check which GPU APIs are being used by your games? (ex. OpenGL, Vulkan) Are those games 64-bit, or 32-bit?

Additionally, you're not missing out on VR side. SteamVR is horrendously broken on Linux

11 comments