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

  1. Shortcuts to steam and to individual games is wonky
  2. Having trouble using different proton versions and trying different ones causes a situation where I have to reboot to use steam
  3. Something I don’t understand about remounting disks and the interaction with steam on how it references it’s library.

Detail

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  • captainWhatsHisName@lemm.eeOP
    3·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • limer@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      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