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[SOLVED]Can't get a singe game to run on Mint or POP (lemm.ee)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

58 comments fedilink hide all child comments

PROBLEM IS FIXED:

Games now run when installed from within Linux through Steam and the EA App. Everything so far have worked flawlessly. Here's a good mix of what I've tried so far. Hitman 3, 9-Bit Armies, Divine Divinity, Metro 2033 Redux, C&C Tiberian Sun, C&C Red Alert 2

Solution: Pop!_OS and Linux Mint doesn't have a kernel new enough to support the Mesa 25 drivers needed for my 9070XT. These commands in the terminal was the fix for this:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kisak/kisak-mesa
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Original Post here:

Hi guys, it’s me again.

My issues is that no windows game on Steam will run. With any launch option or proton version (tried about 10). Most just doesn’t open at all. (Click play, nothing happens)

Tried for hours last night and resorted to just throw shit at the wall to see if something would stick for the last hour or so. Exhausted dozens of fixes found on ProtonDB and forums.(I want to try some again after another fresh install though)

Testing Linux on a dual boot system. First I tried Mint and had a pretty bad time due to me messing up the size of one of my partitions(Just made everything a bit more work) later reinstalled but tried POP, which went good and it’s a lot nicer to run now.

Here’s a few I tried a bunch of different troubleshooting on:

Hitman 3 - doesn’t open or artifacts and freeze before getting to the menu (Mint, both from a NTFS and fresh install EXT4 drive) 9 bit armies - doesn’t open at all or crash after splash screen (Pop and fresh install on EXT4 drive) Civilization Beyond Earth - Artfacting and 10fps (Mint and Pop, NTFS drive) Cyberpunk- Doesn’t open (Pop and Mint, NTFS drive AOM: Retold - Doesn’t open (Pop and Mint, NTFS and fresh on EXT4) Ready or Not - Doesn’t open (Pop and Mint, NTFS)

Also tried 5-6 more games old and new. None would open.

One thing I will note is that both installs failed to install GPU drivers properly. But I fixed that with a guide and the console.

Specs: R7 7700 RX 9070 XT 32GB RAM

Any tips on where to start ? I’m gonna start from the bottom with a fresh install of either Mint or Pop tonight. (Or any other Distro, honestly)

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Glad you got it fixed! You should update your title to say "Solved".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Gonna try this, I've had issues running TF2 on mint

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Eyyy! I see you got mint up and running, congrats dude! :D

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

This community gave me the best kind of help. Gave me ways to figure out my problem, understand why it was happening and then a solution.

I’m probably buying another SSD to put in my system for an alternative OS. And at this rate I might put Windows on it and main Linux.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I know this is a dumb question, but did you turn on Proton in the steam settings?

I had to manually enable Proton before any of my games would work on Linux.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

Yep.

Issue was found to be Mint or Pop won’t install a Mesa driver new enough to support a 9070 XT.

Fixed that and now pretty much everything works. (That I install on a Linux drive, games on my Windows partitions doesn’t work, but that’s fine)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

Hey friend, looks like you might be spinning your wheels yet.

You have two options to get driver support for the 9070:

manually update the Linux kernel in mint/pop to 6.13
install a distro that has 6.13 by default

Here's a mint thread talking about it, pop os will be the same.

That said, I can't in good conscience recommend the manual route for a Linux newbie, so strongly consider a fedora or arch based distro.

If gaming is your primary use case, the ones with tons of gaming apps and tweaks built in are Bazzite (based on fedora atomic), nobara (based on fedora), and garuda "Dr460nized" gaming (Based on Arch)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

Great info, thank you!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

I’m gonna give the mint route a go(just did a fresh install) or I’m doing Fedora or something similar.

I’m down to at least give the slightly more advanced stuff a go at least. I can always just reinstall and at least I learn a long the way.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

strongly consider a fedora or arch based distro.

I very much do not recommend an arch-based distro for a newbie.

If you need a newer kernel:

Fedora or Bazzite or Nobara (as you mentioned)
Debian testing (not sure what version it ships, the online package search isn't working ATM for me)
openSUSE Tumbleweed (what I use) or Aeon (what I'm testing out) - definitely on 6.14 now

But Arch-based distros will break for someone new to Linux. Maybe not in the first month, but probably somewhere in the first year. That's not to say Arch is a bad distro or anything, I used it for several years for both work and play, just that it expects users to know what they're doing, and most new users don't.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (2 children)

There’s nothing wrong with an Arch-based distro for gaming. Shit, the Steam Deck is built on Arch, and it’s about as newbie friendly as anything.

That being said, Bazzite is probably the best for gaming, regardless of whether you’re a newbie or not.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

I also would never recommend Arch to a Linux newbie. I've used it for a couple years too as my DD and am very comfortable with it, and not looking to switch off it. But suggesting it to someone new is just asking for trouble. If they even get through the initial install within their first attempt and have it bootable, that'd be surprising. It's very powerful and incredibly customizable, but that's irrelevant if you're just needing to learn the system.

Also Steam Deck being built on Arch is moot. You don't install Steam OS yourself, it comes preinstalled so people can jump right on.

Can confirm though that Bazzite is a great system for someone new who wants to game as their primary purpose on their PC. Can be tricky if the immutable system causes you to not be able to do other things though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Steam Deck

It's managed like a console, meaning users don't really manage the system. You can install flatpaks, but that's about it, managing packages with pacman just isn't a thing. Bazzite is largely the same way, the base OS is immutable and updated with atomic updates.

Saying Steam OS is Arch is like saying the Switch is FreeBSD. It's technically correct, but not in the sense that actually matters.

And yeah, Bazzite is totally fine. If you don't touch the internals, you probably won't have any issues, especially if you run an AMD GPU. But I don't really consider it an "Arch distribution" because of that immutable base OS. I use an immutable distro on my laptop (openSUSE Aeon), and I love it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I knew that would happen.

FWIW, there are many arch-based distros with a lot of handholding. Heck, garuda has built in btrfs snapshots on update. I believe OP would have an easier time using garuda than setting up all the other things necessary to make other plain rolling release distributions work.

To OP, raw arch is definitely not for newbies. Don't try to install arch to fix your issue.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Honestly, the whole Arch family is problematic because everyone does things a bit differently with different assumptions, so support doesn't exactly transfer. Arch in particular also expects you to do a lot of your own research, and that tends to carry with the various derivatives.

When you're new, you want something mainstream with a ton of users with a variety of configurations so you have a better shot at getting support for the problems you'll run into. You also probably want something recent, especially for gaming since there are a lot of changes to the gaming landscape.

That's why I recommend stable distros with relatively up-to-date packages. My go-to is Debian, and if you need something newer, upgrade to whatever the testing release is (in this case trixie). Fedora is also a great option. I personally use openSUSE Tumbleweed and Aeon (and soon Kalpa), but I don't recommend those distros because they're relatively niche so getting support may be difficult. They rarely break, but new users seem to attract Murphy's Law more than others, hence why I don't recommend it for new users.

As a second or third distro, sure, it's absolutely fantastic. I loved Arch when I used it, and I mostly switched because I wanted to run the same family of distros on my desktop and servers, and I wanted something a bit more stable than Arch for servers. I realize now that what I actually want is a separation between base OS and running services, so I've switched to containerization and am porting to a rolling distro for my servers as well (in this case, MicroOS, coming from Leap). But I definitely do not recommend Arch for new users because it has very few guardrails out of the box for when things go wrong.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The common consensus I’ve seen is for newbies to the stay away from Arch but maybe I’ll that Garuda one. From the screenshots it looks fantastic.

Mint just looks like strange Windows. Still looks great, but very similar to the interview I’m bored to death with.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

You can get pretty much any interface on any distro, so if you're judging a distro based on how it looks, you're probably not the target audience for Arch since Arch leaves all of that choice and responsibility on the user. Arch is a fantastic distro if you want what it offers, and you're okay managing what it doesn't offer.

Garuda is probably fine, idk, just avoid Manjaro IMO (they promise stability, but time and time again they've proven they can't deliver that). I personally recommend going with the more "professional" distros, because you'll have a lot more ready resources for help if something goes wrong.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

I’m not judging a distro just on how it looks. I do judge the standard interface as I wasn’t aware you could easily change it.

I’m up for a challenge, but I’m skeptical to Arch as it seems like it’s a bit too advanced for someone who’s totally green like myself.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

The other commenter is giving good advice, but I think they're knee-jerking a bit hard on the arch base. I presented 3 gaming oriented distributions. All have guardrails. All are opinionated. All are fully featured, user-friendly experiences.

Yes, arch (by itself) is a bad idea as a solution, but so is gentoo, and so is Debian testing.

I believe the issues they're so concerned about actually apply to every rolling release distro like the others, but it's the only way you're going to get OOTB support for the 9700xt until the major release distributions catch up.

Linux users have strong feelings and often let perfect at any expense get in the way of good enough and cheap. This is a demonstrably negative experience for new users.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Arch doesn't have a standard interface, you pick it yourself. By default you get a terminal and no UI whatsoever.

On most Linux distributions, you'll install a pattern (basket of packages) for whatever you want, like gnome-desktop or plasma-desktop then reboot and it should be an option to pick at the login screen. There are dozens to choose from, and they all have various features and caveats. Installing multiple is generally fine, so feel free to experiment. Some distros have a very customized interface, so you may need to customise it a bit to match what you see in screenshots.

I recommend either KDE Plasma or GNOME to start. Broadly speaking, GNOME is more unique (inspired by macOS iI guess) and stable since it's sponsored by RedHat, whereas KDE Plasma is more familiar (looks like customized Windows) and still pretty stable since it has a large community.

The specific distro doesn't matter that much for the interface, so pick something mainstream with at least an option for more recent packages.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Thanks for the explanation! Makes choosing a distro all that much easier.

It seems I’ve managed to get Mint to work too, so I’ll test it out some

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Woo! Have fun!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Garuda is more user friendly than most arch distros, but you really might want to consider something like bazzite. You can always change the desktop environment and theme as much as you want regardless of distro, although if you're looking for a Windows -like experience I recommend KDE with it's default settings.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The GPU driver might not have been initialised. This can happen because of Secure Boot being enabled in the BIOS. I've only seen this happen with NVIDIA GPU's though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

I disabled that before starting the whole process. But I’ll check if it came back on

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

FYI: https://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago (2 children)

What jumps out to me is that you mention installing a GPU driver, but most of the time with AMD cards you don't have to mess with that as it uses the open source driver that comes with the distro.

How did you install this driver?

As your card is very new, it may benefit from a newer version of the MESA driver and a newer kernel.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

This and Steam starting with Vulkan errors might have figures it out. My OS is running Mesa 24.0.3, which looks to predate my graphics card.

I’ll try a manual update and see how that goes

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Since Pop OS is based on the LTS version of Ubuntu (long term support), it may lag behind a bit on having drivers for the very latest hardware. Mint is also based on Ubuntu LTS, which would explain why it didn't work there either.

This guide shows how to use a PPA (basically like a mini repository with newer stuff back ported to work with the LTS) to upgrade to a newer Mesa version. Hopefully that gets you up and running!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Tried that but it’s still on Mesa 24. I’m doing something wrong somewhere but I don’t know what at this point.

Maybe a non-Ubuntu distro would be better for me?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Hm, just to be sure, you're trying sudo apt upgrade (not update) at the end?

A distro with newer stuff likely would work out of the box, though they tend to be a bit less new user friendly compared to Mint and Pop.

Fedora is generally recommended as the best compromise, but with it comes the need to use a third party repository called RPMFusion to get patent encumbered software like video codecs and steam. After it's setup it's usually smooth sailing, but something to bear in mind.

A non-lts version of Ubuntu should also work, as that's more up to date.

If you'd like to troubleshoot pop a bit more, I believe a newer kernel should be available in your repository, 6.11 perhaps? (I'm not actually sure, I just know Linux Mint has it available). If it's not available, you could grab the Xanmod kernel, which I recall being pretty easy to install, and is very up to date.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Yes, used Upgrade, told me nothing was changed or upgraded. Update told me nothing was available.

Did a jump back to Mint again as I found a few parts of it nicer than Pop and was gonna reinstall anyways.

If this doesn’t work. I’m just going to try Fedora.

As of now I’m stuck on Mesa 24 still, but it’s a newer one than I got on Pop. Kernel is set up to 6.11-something right now. Found a guide to get a newer kernel and then Mesa 25 that I’m gonna the later. (Looks like Mesa 25 only works on 6.12 and newer?)

If nothing else, this is actually kind a fun and interesting. But nowhere near where I want it for daily driving outside of browser use. But I guess my GPU is to «blame» for being too new

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

But I guess my GPU is to «blame» for being too new

Unfortunately yes :(

The stable distros aren't super good when it comes to the latest hardware, but but for slightly older stuff they're pretty great.

I hope you succeed in getting mint into shape, though! :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Not even that, fedora has added for a few versions codecs and proprietary stuff as opt-in "third party repos" during user account creation.

Just put bazzite and enjoy, it takes away all the tinkering

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

I tried both Bazzite and Fedora the past couple months, and this was my personal experience:

While Fedora does have a codec installing option in the installer now, it still doesn't seem to include some common ones (couldn't play certain formats until I installed the non-fedora flatpak VLC player).

Bazzite was very nice, though apps seemed a little slow to open. At some point all apps refused to open, which may have been my fault, but it was at that point that I noticed how incredibly sparse help documentation was, and how many questions (that were relevant to my issue) remained unanswered on the uBlue forum for months.

I think for a new user, access to good help documentation and resources is essential, so I currently don't recommend it for newbies.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I’m guessing this is my issue too. I did some searching and the 9000 cards should work fine in Pop OS. So this is indeed strange.

I can’t remember what the commands where actually. Sudo apt something 😂

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Then go to the command line and do

history | grep "apt"

This will list all commands that include "apt", that you ever executed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I ran apt update and then apt upgrade. That allowed me the kernel I needed to at least change the resolution and refreshrate. But it seems the Mesa driver I got then and get now is too old for the 9070 XT. Also got a bunch of error of Vulkan missing, so I guess I know why games wouldn’t run now.

I need Mesa 25 and stuck on 24. looking at tutorials for getting the newest mesa driver on Mint 22z. (Did a fresh install)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (2 children)

That seems relatively straight forward:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kisak/kisak-mesa
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

The first line adds a repository source, where the mesa packages can be downloaded from via apt.
The other lines just update all repository data and upgrade.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Looks like that might have worked on Mint.

Gonna test it to see if games will run now

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

Haven’t tried that in Mint yet, but it didn’t work in Pop. The terminal didn’t give any errors or anything, it just stayed with Mesa 24.

I’ll just try those commands before anything else i Mint and see what it does.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Please upload a probe to https://linux-hardware.org/ and share the link. It should provide a bunch of important information to help debugging.

Also, try running steam in the terminal and sharing that output.

Also, does glxgears show you anything?

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

Running steam through the terminal gave me a bunch of Vulkan related errors.

I’ll do some more testing

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Sounds a lot like my first to days of trying to open games on linux (I am on Manjaro with KDE Plasma). I missed to create a swap partition and my RAM couldn't handle some games that just didn't start or closed after a few minutes. Maybe that's your problem as well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Run steam from a terminal and see if you can spot any errors in the logs.

Steam games tend to just close without displaying anything in the GUI.

Also, install steam from a deb package if you can. It's the native package format for pop and mint, and will give you the least issues.

https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Sounds like you've tried some different formatted partitions for the os, have you done the same for the games too? When I switched from Windows to dual-boot Linux I kept my existing NTFS partition for games, those games shows up as installed in Steam but wouldn't launch properly.

If that doesn't help, add this to your game's launch options to get a log which should include an error:

PROTON_LOG=1 %command%

Log should be in your home directory.

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