How to Fix Windows Games That Are Not Working With Steam Proton
296In this video I cover three possible solutions that I have used that fixed games that refused to work with Steam Proton.
This video assumes three things:
https://www.protondb.com/
You have checked out ProtonDB and read the reports about the game and 100% confirmed it is possible to run the game on Linux.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan_(API)#Hardware
You are 100% using a GPU that supports Vulkan.
https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom
Finally you have tried different versions of Proton, either the official Valve releases or custom ones such as Proton-GE.
Solution 1 – Install the Latest Driver for Your GPU / Disable AMD Radeon Driver
https://github.com/lutris/docs/blob/master/InstallingDrivers.md
A great guide on driver installation can be found on the Lutris wiki page about drivers and covers the method of installing both AMD and nVidia drivers on Arch, Manjaro, Fedora and Ubuntu based distributions.
Just to note, although nVidia have a single proprietary driver, AMD have three drivers, two open source, and one proprietary which can coexist alongside each other, but for about 99% of cases, you will be using the Mesa open-source driver, which depending on your distribution, may not be installed or enabled by default.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Requirements
In addition, if you have a Radeon R9 200/300 series GPU, you will need to blacklist the radeon module in order to use Vulkan.
Solution 2 – Delete Existing Wine Prefix
When you install Windows games through Steam on Linux, what typically happens is that the game is installed on the steamapps / common folder, and an accompanying Wine prefix is created in the compact folder.
This is important because sometimes if you switch between Proton versions, the Wine prefix can get confused, and not correctly register causing the game to not load.
This is more apparent if you use custom versions of Proton such as Proton-GE that have separate fixes to the default Proton builds. ]
To resolve this, delete the Wine prefix, which will not delete the game from your system, but any configuration such as graphic settings, and saved games will be removed.
You can delete the folder through your file manager or through the Terminal with:
rm – r
Bare in mind that latter option will completely remove the folder and no move to the recycle bin, so you cannot undo this action.
Solution 3 – Do Not Use The NTFS File System
Install your games on a native Linux file system such as Ext4 and not NTFS as due to differences in permissions between the two file systems games will not load with Proton on a NTFS file system.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Using-a-NTFS-disk-with-Linux-and-Windows
There is documentation on getting a NTFS formatted disk to work with Proton but due to the risk of data loss involved, I do not recommend it.
#linuxgaming #proton #fixes