A few months ago I switched from Windows 10 to Linux Mint. I’m mostly able to play games but there are some annoyances. I’m hoping an expert can help identify these issues.
Summary of issues
- Shortcuts to steam and to individual games is wonky
- Having trouble using different proton versions and trying different ones causes a situation where I have to reboot to use steam
- Something I don’t understand about remounting disks and the interaction with steam on how it references it’s library.
Detail
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First of all, When I installed steam, it added a link under Menu->Games->Steam. This link doesn’t work. It appears to launch but then the screen just blinks every once in a while. I have to end up killing steam from the process monitor. If I open a terminal and type “steam”, and then run games from the steam UI window, they mostly run ok. Sometimes I am able to run a game by clicking the link that gets added to Menu->Games. This actually opens the steam UI (if it was closed) and launches the game.
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Second, there are a few games that don’t work very well, especially ones that play videos. For these I’ve tried Proton Experimental. This sometimes works, but sometimes games get stuck on some percentage of “processing vulcan shaders”. I try to kill steam and restart but the only thing that works is a full reboot. So when I kill steam there is still stuff floating around that needs to be ended but I’m not sure how to identify it. BTW I also tried installing Proton GE but that seemed to hose everything and I had to remove it.
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The third thing is that I don’t exactly know how the library is associated with a drive. I have a 2nd drive that I can’t get to mount automatically. It recently had a corruption and I went into the Disks utility and repaired it. While there I went to the “Edit Mount Options” and saw a toggle for “User Session Defaults”. I unchecked this and rebooted. The drive mounted with no issue, which is great. Unfortunately, when I started Steam, it did not know the drive anymore and any game that I had installed only said “Install”. So I went to the steam settings and re-added the drive for the steam library. The games reappeared as installed, but then I got errors that cloud sync had failed and the games wouldn’t run. So I’m guessing there is some drive id associated with the installs, and the “User Session Defaults” causes the drive to have a different id or something? Or possibly I set the steam library base directory to the wrong value. I eventually changed the mount options and put back “User Session Defaults”. So the games work again but the drive doesn’t mount on startup again.
I’ve pretty exclusively gamed on mint for 2 years with very very little issues for the most part its plug and play with the occasional steam compatibility change in settings. Don’t launch from desktop icons it’s buggy. I’ve never had issues with hard drive locations changing or anything like you speak of until I decided to use USB drives for game storage. Definitely don’t do that. Media is fine but games nope it works most of the time but causes a headache. Also don’t plug in a Linux drive to windows it Bork’s them and then you have to command line to repair at least for me. Windows blows. I’m on an all AMD system though which widely helps compatibility.
Re: don’t plug in a linux drive to window: This is a pretty new (all AMD) machine that had windows 11. I added a new drive and put linux on it and had a dual boot going. Just one time I tried to access the windows drive from linux to try to run a game I had installed there and it corrupted the windows drive. So yeah, I won’t try to connect them.
Are you using the flatpak? I’ve never had anything but silly perm issues with that. Using the repo installed from the deb + proton GE works smoothly for me for everything.
I installed it from the Software Manager tool in Mint.
There are 6 reviews for it. The top review has this comment which sounds similar to my experience:
4 weeks after DarkRacoon, and I have the same problem. Steam kind of launches, shows up like an invisble window, then closes again. I also need to kill the Steam process, uninstall through Software Manager and then re-install again. All games are still installed, so it’s just annoying to re-install Steam itself. And btw, yes I have ran the dpkg apt update mentioned in the Details section.
As I mentioned, I am new to Mint. I’ve used linux and unix before so I’m not totally lost, but the UI interface is a bit confusing for me, at least how it relates to the inner workings. So I guess you advocating that I figure out how to use flatpack. I assume it works sort of like Chocolatey on windows or Homebrew on Mac.
I’ve installed from steam after downloading it the deb from the website , and steam self updates. I never had issues on mint, Ubuntu or popos for years.
I really don’t know much, and anyone should take this with a grain of salt: but in my opinion any other way of installing steam on this branch of Linux is asking for trouble
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don’t use the shortcuts. steam on linux is a buggy mess, i have had those shortcuts corrupt the game so bad i had to remove and reinstall the game more than once…
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in steam settings, disable shaders pre-caching. that’s only a waste of time feature and it will cause some games fail to launch.
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when you unticked user defaults, it changed the mount point and maybe the id too. your secondary drive can be located in different directories. personally i always set it under /mnt and set id as HDD.
extra tip: use a better kernel like liquirix or xanmod. in my experience games have lower latency, and system doesn’t hang when there’s some resource intensive task going on. they are very easy to set up too. in liquorix you paste one command in the terminal and reboot, and in xanmod you paste 3 commands. if a kernel fails to boot you can always use the old one too, so there’s no risk even. (just tap shift key on boot until you get grub menu)
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Regarding wonky links, I can’t say I’m familiar with the issue. You could try checking Mint’s desktop files to see how the commands are set up, and if they work fine manually through the terminal. If they don’t, that’s probably an indication of where the issue is.
Regarding videos, those are… problematic, some times even on Windows (FF Type-0 and Mary Skelter PTSD intensifies). Perhaps you’re missing a drive, or Proton’s equivalent of winecfg may need some manual tinkering.
And regarding auto-mounting drives, are they being automatically mounted to a static path, and before Steam is loaded? Also maybe deactivating Steam’s auto-start, if it’s active, helps?
