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)

  • Caveman@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    11 months ago

    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 problem to see if you can get more clues if the above doesn’t work.

    • Lemmilicious@feddit.nuOPEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      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!

  • angrymouse@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • Lemmilicious@feddit.nuOPEnglish
      4·
      11 months ago

      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!

  • youmaynotknow@lemmy.mlEnglish
    91·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • BananaTrifleViolin@kbin.social
    7·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • Shaka@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      5·
      11 months ago

      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

      • Zaphod@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        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)

    • Lemmilicious@feddit.nuOPEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • Shaka@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        3·
        11 months ago

        But are your games installed in the Ext4 partition? See my other reply from before.

  • wingsfortheirsmilesEnglish
    6·
    11 months ago

    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

  • RiderExMachina@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    11 months ago

    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

    • Lemmilicious@feddit.nuOPEnglish
      5·
      11 months ago

      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!

  • burgersc12@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    61·
    11 months ago

    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

    • Fal@yiffit.netEnglish
      51·
      11 months ago

      Imo distro doesn’t matter very much.

      Except that they’re on Ubuntu 22.04. which is totally ancient at this point

      • burgersc12@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        12·
        11 months ago

        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…

        • Fal@yiffit.netEnglish
          11·
          11 months ago

          Yeah, start adding PPAs or installing software from source. That’s much more likely to make things work for a beginner

          • burgersc12@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            11·
            11 months ago

            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

            • Fal@yiffit.netEnglish
              21·
              11 months ago

              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?

              • burgersc12@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                11·
                11 months ago

                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

                • Fal@yiffit.netEnglish
                  11·
                  11 months ago

                  Because

                  1. 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
                  2. 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
  • Commiunism@lemmy.wtfEnglish
    4·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • Defaced@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • BlanK0@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    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.