this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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I made a new computer in November, and while I didn't try Mint (I don't think) I installed 3 or 4 different versions if Linux. In them, I installed steam and Nvidia drivers, but most of my game library said they weren't playable. If I didn't have kids I could have spent more time and gotten it working, but is Mint different? Would they have been playable on it?
You have to change your steam settings to attempt to use proton. Once you do this, steam will allow the games to play. Practically everything will work once you do this.
...shiiiiiiit, I had so much fucking trouble getting games to work (most steam games just wouldn't even launch) and never discovered this. This is why linux is still unsuitable for the non-technical consumer; I'm a former unix sysadmin, I've hand-edited SysV runlevels and bootstrapped gcc and shit, but I've been out of it so long that a lot of shit has changed and I don't even know where to look for solutions other than just googling 'reddit XYZ doesn't work' and hoping I find solutions that are even relevant to the distro I'm running.
Quick question, I've seen split opinions on this - I have an SSD that just has my games installed (mostly steam games) under windows, is it reasonable to try to mount that under linux and try to run games that way, or should I just reinstall them onto the linux drive?
I had quite a lot of the same frustration because, although I was never a sysadmin (more like a senior dev who has done a lot of software systems development and design for software systems where the back and middle tier are running on Linux servers, which involved amongst other things managing development servers), I was used to the Linux structure of a decade and more ago (i.e. runtime levels and the old style commands for things like network info) and the whole SystemD stuff and this whole raft of new fashionable command line info and admin tools that replaced the old (and perfectly fine) ones was quite frustrating to get to grips with.
That said, I've persevered and have by now been using Linux on my gaming rig for 8 months with very few problems and a pretty high success rate at running games (most of which require no tweaking) not just Steam games but also GOG games using Lutris as launcher.
That said, I only figured out the "magical" Steam config settings to get most games to run on Linux when I was desperately googling how to do it.
Oh, and by the way, Pop!OS is a branch of Ubuntu, so at least when it comes to command line tools and locations of files in the filesystem, most help for Ubuntu out there also works with Pop!OS.
Yeah, that's my main issue is just all the stuff I'm familiar with has changed. And that's not a problem for the OS, it's been 15+ years since I've messed with it so that stuff should've changed. It's more frustration with how much of a pain it is to relearn it all, especially as I'm older and have other stuff I would rather be spending my time with than poking around 40 pages into a man page to try to make basic shit work.
Re:games - if you happen to have a link to that magical steam config that would be immensely helpful, cause I'm gonna try again at some point, and the more resources I can sock away toward making that less painful the more likely I am to stick with it, and being able to play games is my #1 requirement to do that.
You would think so, but they use different packages (they swap pulseaudio with pipewire or vice versa, etc) and put things in different locations, so I was often frustrated by solutions tailored to Ubuntu that required editing files that just didn't exist in PopOS.
Well, the "magical" Steam config was that stuff others pointed out that you need to in Steam actually under Settings -> Compatibility enable use of Steam Play with Proton for all titles since that's not enabled by default.
Oh, I thought you were saying there was some additional config. Cool, thanks.