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)
I very much do not recommend an arch-based distro for a newbie.
If you need a newer kernel:
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.
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.
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
pacmanjust 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Woo! Have fun!
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.
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.