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.