Comment by Biganon
21 hours ago
I'm tired of people saying Steam on Linux just works. It doesn't.
Tried running Worms: instant crash, no error message.
Tried running Among Us: instant crash, had to add cryptic arguments to the command line to get it to run.
Tried running Parkitect: crashes after 5 minutes.
These three games are extremely simple, graphically speaking. They don't use any complicated anti-cheat measure. This shouldn't be complicated, yet it is.
Oh and I'm using Arch (BTW), the exact distro SteamOS is based on.
And of course, as always, those for which it works will tell you you're doing-it-wrong™ .
These games are all rated gold or platinum on protondb, indicating that they work perfectly for most people.
Hard to say what might be going wrong for you without more details. I would guess there's something wrong with your video driver. Maybe you have an nvidia card and the OS has installed the nouveau drivers by default? Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things. This is indeed a sore spot for Linux gaming, though to be fair graphics driver problems are not exactly unheard of on Windows either.
Personally I have a bunch of machines dedicated to gaming in my house (https://lanparty.house) which have proven to be much more stable running Linux than they were with Windows. I think this is because the particular NIC in these machines just has terrible Windows drivers, but decent Linux drivers (and I am netbooting, so network driver stability is pretty critical to the whole system).
AoE2:DE is rated gold even though multiplayer is broken for everyone, and it lags. By now someone has posted a very complex workaround to the MP issue, but it was gold even before that.
BeamNG (before a very recent native Linux beta) was gold despite a serious fps drop and also a memleak to crash any time there's traffic.
So I don't trust the ratings.
> Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things
Interesting. I saw somewhere else you're using Debian. Is it as opposed from Nouveau or the proprietary drivers from the Debian repos?
I'm currently testing to daily drive my desktop with linux on an NVIDIA GPU, and the Arch wiki explicitly recommends drivers from their repos. However, arch is rolling and the repo drivers are supposedly much more up to date than Debian's ones. Though, I'll keep your comment if I run into anything.
I am not familiar with Arch, so my advice might be wrong for Arch.
But I have a lot of experience on Debian and Ubuntu trying to use the packages that handle the nvidia driver installation for you. It works OK. But one day on a lark I tried downloading the blob directly from nvidia and installing that way, and I was surprised to find it was quite smooth and thorough, so I've been doing it that way ever since.
> Personally I have a bunch of machines dedicated to gaming in my house (https://lanparty.house)
Woah, that is extremely cool. Very nice work, sir.
> Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things.
Crazy—it used to be that nvidia drivers were by far the least stable parts of an install, and nouveau was a giant leap forward. Good to know their software reputation has improved somewhat
Nouveau has never been good for gaming. Not their fault (they had to reverse engineer everything), but it was only really ever viable for mostly 2D desktops in my experience.
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NVIDIA on Linux is a pain, either path.
Whereas, AMD just works and is thus standard recommendation.
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I imagine the people saying “it just works” are saying it because it does, at least for them.
SteamOS is based on Arch, but customized and aimed at specific hardware configurations. It’d be interesting to know what hardware you’re using and if any of your components are not well supported.
FWIW, I’ve used Steam on Linux (mostly PopOS until this year, then Bazzite) for years and years without many problems. ISTR having to do something to make Quake III work a few years ago, but it ran fine after and I’ve recently reinstalled it and didn’t have to fuss with anything.
Granted, I don’t run a huge variety of games, but I’ve finished several or played for many hours without crashes, etc.
I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, and I've never had trouble running a game that's rated gold or above. I've even gotten an Easy AntiCheat game to work correctly.
I've been gaming on linux exclusively for about 8 years now and have had very few issues running windows games. Sometimes the windows version, run through proton, runs better than the native port. I don't tend to be playing AAA games right after launch day, though. So it could be taste is affecting my experience.
I just bought another second Dell workstation (admit I hated those) and can’t wait to install SteamOS when it is released to the public. I don’t care about AAA gaming but the integrated card should be able to handle most of the games from ten years ago.
> And of course, as always, those for which it works will tell you you're doing-it-wrong™ .
This sounds like you are rejecting help because you have made up your mind in frustration already.
Because you are doing it wrong. If you want an OS that just works, you should use Ubuntu or Fedora. Why is SteamOS based on Arch then? Because Valve wants to tweak things in it and tinker with it themselves to get it how they like.
You don't.
So use an OS that requires less from you and that tries to just work out of the box, not one that is notorious for being something you break and tinker with constantly (Arch).
I've been using Arch for 15 years, it's not like I'm suddenly discovering the concept of the distro.
But when something crashes with no error message whatsoever, it makes it a tiny bit harder to troubleshoot.
Especially when so many people answer, just like I had predicted, "works on my machine". Which would only be a gotcha if I had implied it worked on no machine whatsoever. Which I didn't.
I'll tinker some more and I'll be sure to post my findings if I get these games to work.
Well then look at the logs? Sure it's not as in-your-face, but steam/proton does log and I'm fairly sure that a combination of at most setting a command invocation parameter, looking at the game logs and system logs will show you the exact problem and given that these games run just fine for a lot of people, the fix is probably trivial.
Ubuntu is based on Debian Sid which is considered as the least stable release in Debian community.
This is a non sequitur because "stability" in Debian has a specific meaning and Canonical also does things to ensure their release works properly.
I am using Arch and all the games I played on Steam (at least 20, not the ones mentioned above) worked perfectly.
One thing that I do though is get most games at least one year after release, when probably many issues are fixed. I had tons of issues many years ago, with buggy games bought immediately after release (on Windows back then), so now I changed strategy...
I don't have your other games, but I do have a few Worms games and they worked out of the box for me with GE Proton on NixOS.
I'm not saying "you're doing it wrong", because obviously if you're having trouble then that is, if nothing else, bad UX design, but I actually am kind of curious as to what you're doing different than me. I have an extremely vanilla NixOS setup that boots into GameScope + Tenfoot and I drive everything with a gamepad and it works about as easily as a console does for me.
If anything this is the challenge with PC as a platform being so varied, any random software/hardware/config variation could bring a whole load of quirks.
That probably includes anything that isn't a PC in a time-capsule from when the game originally released, so any OS/driver changes since then, and I don't think we've reached the point where we can emulate specific hardware models to plug into a VM. One of the reasons the geforce/radeon drivers (eg, the geforce "game ready" branding) are so big is that they carry a whole catalogue of quirk workarounds for when the game renderer is coded badly or to make it a better fit to hardware and lets them advertise +15% performance in a new version. Part of the work for wine/proton/dxvk is going to be replicating that instead of a blunt translation strictly to the standards.
Yeah, I think Linus himself pointed out that the desktop is the hardest platform to support because it's unbelievably diverse and varied.
With regards to Linux I generally just focus on hardware from brands that have historically had good Linux support, but that's just a rule of thumb, certainly not perfect.
Worms run just fine IF you force the proton version. There is a really old and unmaintained Linux version that doesn't work.
Never had any issues with among us, but granted it was a long time since I tried it now.
As an Arch (btw) user myself, yes, you're doing something wrong.
Arch won't hold your hands to ensure everything required is installed, because many dependencies are either optional (you have to read the pacman logs) or just hidden (because it's in the game itself). Valve actually does a great job providing a "works everywhere" runtime as their games are distributed in a flatpak-like fashion, but things can seep through the cracks.
The compositor can have an effect. The desktop settings. The GPU drivers. What's installed as far as e.g. fonts go. RAM setup, with or without swap.
As for steamOS, the real difference, is that despite being Arch-based, you're not installing Arch, but steamOS. A pre-packaged pre-configured Arch linux, with a set of opinionated software and its set of pre-made config files, for a small set of (1) devices. It's not really Arch you're installing, but a full-blow distro that happens to be arch-based.
That said, I understand your frustration as I've hit this many times on a laptop with dual graphics. Getting PRIME to run with the very first drivers that supported it was fun. Oh and I'm likely to hit the same walls as you since I just switched my gaming rig to Arch. GLHF!
Arch is nice if you want to tinker. Based on your reasoning, I wouldn't recommend it. But if you still want arch-based, I would recommend EndevourOS, and for even a simpler/better distro, Bazzite.
Split the difference, Fedora. its cutting edge but not in a way that can lead you to make mistakes like arch (BTW).
Its still open to customizing but out of the box is very damn usable and flexible.
Even better is Debian testing :-)
some people want machines that do everything but don't want to do everything to maintain them or even set them up
You are definitely doing it wrong, I rarely have issues and when I do I just switch comparability tools. I play multiple indie games, marvel rivals, I played lots of among us on my machine in 2020. Running Pop OS
I use EndeavourOS, I just installed Worms and Among Us and they are playing right out of the box for me.
Yeah, if you read the actual ProtonDB comments, they're like "works great, after you do this hack, except this part is broken: thumbs up"
Well, but many games just work. Actually, I try starting the games without any tweaks before heading over to protondb.com, and often they run just fine.
But it is also true that many games still require minor tweaks. For example, just last week, I found out that I had to enable hardware acceleration for the webview within Steam, just to be able to log in to Halo Infinite. It was just clicking a checkbox, but otherwise, the game would not have been playable.
But I am always surprised when you find out you have those kinds of issues with Windows as well.
You can force a Proton version in the game settings. "Proton Experimental" almost always fixes any issue you may have.
Ironically, quite a few Linux-compatible games only work for me in compatibility mode.
Yeah, the same. I sometimes google "wine WoW issues" and every time there are recent threads, so I don't even try. Linux has the long way to become gamer platform.
As other have said, it's usually driver or configuration issue, which is why I prefer using the prebuilt, pre-installed steam deck.
> Worms, Among Us, Parkitect
All three games works perfectly well on both Steam OS and on my kid's PC running CachyOS without any intervention.
Don't use Arch unless you don't mind spending time troubleshooting and configuring.
The games don't fail to run because they are so "graphically powerful" they fail to run because you chose to set up your system without the necessary runtime.
There are people who make stripped-down versions of windows. Is it fair to say that because these releases exist that windows isn't "just works" either?
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