Hi, I’ve got a weird issue and figured I’d see if anybody knows how to fix it. I’ve noticed that most of my steam games that have linux native support just crash immediately when I try to run them. Running with Proton works just fine, but I was wondering if my system might be missing something obvious I need to run linux native games?
The latest one I was trying to play was Pyre. I tried looking through the logs, but couldn’t find anything obvious to me.
Edit: Whatever it is, it looks like its not something simple, but that is okay because everything seems to work fine with proton anyway. Thanks for the help anyway! :)
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Currently I prefer Windows versions of games. I understand the people who much rather have a native port, but I’ve come to view Windows (Wine, Proton) as the Linux Gaming API Layer. When you think of it like that, it doesn’t really matter if the game has a native port or not.
Last week I installed a game on Steam (can’t remember the title, sorry) that had a Feral native port. It complained about my card not being supported and crashed. I then installed the Proton version and it simply worked.
Even if there is a native port, it probably takes work to keep up with Linux rapidly evolving features than to keep it running on Windows relatively static APIs.
So I thank Microsoft for the Linux Gaming API (and the intrepid Wine devs), I’m sure they didn’t intend it to be this way but here we are.
Try starting steam from the terminal. A lot of diagnostic info gets printed to stdout and stderr, which you can scroll through after a crash. Search up anything that looks like a serious error, it might point you in the right direction.
Weirdly enough, it did work that time, but froze the game when I tried to exit. I tried another time and it didn’t run the game and gave some errors like:
[___](ERROR: ld.so: object '/REDACTED/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored. )and
Initializing steam Setting breakpad minidump AppID = 462770 free(): invalid pointerand then a long stacktrace. No idea what it means.
The
LD_PRELOADone is actually harmless and annoyingly spams everyone. Steam tries to preload the 32 and 64 bit overlay library into every process and depends on one or the other failing.The free assert is bad and likely related to the crash. The stacktrace might be interesting if you want to share it.
The only cause that comes to mind is something like a libc conflict between the game and your graphics driver. That’s going to be annoying to diagnose/fix though.
Do you see any messages about gperftools? I had memory issues with another steam game (TF2) and it turned out to be a bug in gperftools.
I just grepped the log for gperftools and came up with nothing.
Switching to flatpak steam will often fix these weird steam problems.
For actually troubleshooting it, I’m guessing you have an issue with your steam runtime for Linux games. Try running steam with the console command:
STEAM_RUNTIME=0 steamand see if your games work. Basically by default Steam bundles it’s own runtime packages to run Linux games with. Setting steam runtime to 0 as part of the launch will disable this functionality, and use your systems packages instead.
Another thing you could try, you can open game properties and go to the compatibility section. There you can check “force compatibility layer” and try different steam Linux runtimes (if you have them installed).
Steam wouldn’t start with that, apparently I’m missing some UI & pipewire libraries. Probably safer for me to keep using steams runtimes anyway.
Fixed it on one buddie’s computer, he installed the snap version. We fixed it by removing that one and installing Steam via apt. Which version do you have?
I installed via apt, so should be fine. Oh well!
Try the version hosted on Steam’s website
