First of all, I don’t want you to help me with a specific problem. All the details in this post are just examples and I’m interested in getting a general understanding.

So I just wanted to play doom eternal, but when I press play on steam, after a couple of seconds the button switches from blue back to green with no game running. I checked protondb and saw that the game was gold rated, so it should run fine.

I checked the tweaks that people use and they suggest different proton versions. But no matter what I do, I basically get nothing. There are no error messages or log files. Same with other games I tried in the past.

So basically when a game does not work out of the box, I have no idea where to look for cues on how to fix it. Is there a verbose mode or something similar?

  • @janNatan@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2•2 months ago

    You using an Nvidia GPU? My husband gave me his old one, and it just seemed to give me all kinds of random issues that I never had before on my AMD GPUs. Just a thought.

    I will second what someone else said. My husband had all kinds of issues when he reused his old NTFS drive in Linux. He reformated it to ext3 or 4 I think and hasn’t had major issues since.

  • WFHEnglish
    2•2 months ago

    99% of the time, if a game “should run fine” and nothing happens, it’s because it’s installed on a Windows partition (NTFS or exFat).

    Try moving it to a Linux partition.

    If it still doesn’t work, you can start advanced troubleshooting.

  • @terraborra@lemmy.nzEnglish
    2•2 months ago

    Are you trying to run versions of the games that were installed through the windows steam app? If so, you need to do a fresh install through the Linux client.

  • @mranderson17@infosec.pubEnglish
    2•2 months ago

    In addition to everything everyone else has said, the launch option: PROTON_LOG=1 %command% (from the wiki). It will create a steam-<gameid>.log in your homedir which can have lots of good wine/proton specific information in it.

    You can also rename the user-settings.sample.py file in a given proton version in $HOME/.steam/root/steamapps/common/Proton - <version>/ to user-settings.py and uncomment the additional wine debugging options (PROTON_LOG is already set in this file, but it is not active until it’s renamed or passed directly on the Launch Options line).

  • Goonette ♠️English
    1•2 months ago

    Do you have proton enabled?

    If you don’t have proton enabled, steam will try to launch the game but can’t since .exe files don’t run on linux. You’re not getting an error because there’s nothing happening.