This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/linux_gaming by /u/brovo1134 on 2025-07-01 23:32:37+00:00.
Let me regale you with a tape of me nearly losing my goddamn mind trying to get games working reliably on Linux after switching a couple days ago.
So feeling a burst of inspiration the other day and sick of another windows driver bug, I said screw it I'm going Linux. I have it on my old T420 laptop and was feeling confident, however had never switched due to being a quite avid gamer and worried about incompatibilities.
So I installed Linux Mint, and ran into my first issue. I thought that since I had the games installed on a secondary SSD, I was good to point a fresh steam install to the old hard drive and pick up the old games. That SEEMED to work, until I tried to launch a game and nothing would happen. More furious googling resulted in realizing the NTFS file structure of the old drive was the likely culprit. No problem, I have fast internet. I formatted , reinstalled the games, cleared steam download cache, Budda boom Budda bing things are working! I installed GE proton for future compatibility, tried to enable VRR in amdgpu.conf and shut down for the night feeling pretty good.
Next day, nothing launches. I disabled VRR, look at logs however the game would all say they are running but not launching at all. I restarted, reinstalled the game, nothing. Finally I gave up for a bit and listened to some music, but noticed it said my DAC was connected but no audio was coming out. A quick off and on again fixed that issue. I installed a newer version of GE proton, adjusted some launch parameters and it was working again! I figured it was some faulty launch parameters and went to bed again.
The following morning, try to test a game launch and again and it's the same problem. Steam launches the game, says it is running and nothing happens. At this point I'm losing it, I cannot figure what is going wrong. I switched from mint to cachyos, still buggy. I reformatted and reinstalled my games, and still nothing. I have my head on my desk baffled.
I then decided to relax with some music, and checked that the output was the correct device, my E10k DAC. There was no audio output again... Huh. I reset the DAC and audio is working. I think to myself "no way it's related" and sure enough the game launches FLAWLESSLY. I'm guessing it was trying to hook into the audio and with the bug it would just cause a crash. Native Linux games would launch but way slower than normally. I am going home tonight to confirm that it was indeed the issue.
Now I have to figure out why my audio is getting recognized but won't output until a reset, but at least I have somewhere to start! That was an interesting journey. I just thought I would pass on a story about some self troubleshooting, as usually people come here looking for answers!
