Hey guys, I'm pretty new to Linux gaming and running into an issue I can't figure out. Hoping someone can help me out.

My setup:

• Laptop with Intel i5-6300U and Intel HD 520 graphics
• Running Zorin OS 18
• Trying to play Left 4 Dead (non-Steam version with SmartSteamEmu crack)

• Game: Left 4 Dead (non-Steam version)
• Source: DODI Repack (based on CS-Steam Release)
• Crack: SmartSteamEmu v1.4.3 included
• Launcher: SmartSteamLoader.exe
• Game Files Location: ~/Games/Left 4 Dead/

The problem:
When I use Wine-GE in Bottles or Heroic, the game works perfectly.

https://preview.redd.it/ayisz7pi866g1.png?width=605&format=png&auto=webp&s=599991e58ec9ed47bf82d26ccf840d030c457bf4

https://preview.redd.it/7pr55o6l866g1.png?width=1366&format=png&auto=webp&s=f2ae055ae4a86a7c159d81ee3300cf6d2fe22fb1

But when I switch to GE-Proton, I get this error:

https://preview.redd.it/bgn95fy7866g1.png?width=605&format=png&auto=webp&s=814ed57de34c5fafc6e3b2b0966171e3892c3ce2

text

https://preview.redd.it/75vxxdnx766g1.png?width=294&format=png&auto=webp&s=62b731a8ba8f646f9d99a6eaab6247daf42a9a91

What's weird:

• Same game files, same settings, just different "runner"
• Wine-GE works, GE-Proton doesn't
• Even tried running actual Steam in background - still fails

What I've tried:

• Different GE-Proton versions
• With/without DXVK
• Windows 7 and Windows 10

My questions:

1. Why does GE-Proton fail when Wine-GE works on the exact same game?
2. Is there a way to "trick" GE-Proton into working with cracked/non-Steam games?
3. Should I be using DLL overrides or something similar?
4. Do I just accept that GE-Proton is only for real Steam games?

What I want:
I'd like to use GE-Proton because people say it has better performance for some games. But right now I can only use Wine-GE for my non-Steam games.

Has anyone gotten GE-Proton to work with SmartSteamEmu or Goldberg emulator games? What did you do to fix the "Steam is not running" error?

Thanks for any help! Still learning this Linux gaming stuff.

Why it's confusing: Everything else is identical - game files, settings, everything. Just swapping Wine-GE for GE-Proton breaks it. Makes me think GE-Proton is "checking" for Steam in a way that Wine-GE doesn't.

❗❗ UPDATE / INTERESTING FIND: I just discovered that Dead Space 1 (another DODI repack from 2008) runs perfectly with BOTH Wine-GE AND GE-Proton on the same system. This makes the Left 4 Dead issue even more confusing - why does GE-Proton work with some repacks but not others?

Has anyone else noticed GE-Proton being picky with certain games/cracks?

I submitted this issue to the gamescope repo after I drilled down the issue to gamescope headless mode. For whatever reason, in Expedition 33 specifically, the shadows look blocky and it's really distracting. Running this game with a gamescope wrapper on gnome or plasma looks fine, so I think this is specifically related to the gamescope compositor but I really don't know.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/issues/2017

In my experience with gaming on Linux, there's some dependency I'm missing or something but I just can't figure it out. Does anyone have any ideas of things I can try? Hardware is in the github issue.

Hello guys, I hope some of you can help me. Unfortunately I am new to linux :*) Thanks in advance:

Running ts3server is giving me problems: ❯ sudo /usr/bin/ts3server [sudo] password for <USER>: 2025-12-09 10:46:08.255477|INFO |ServerLibPriv | |TeamSpeak 3 Server 3.13.7 (2022-06-20 12:21:53) 2025-12-09 10:46:08.255566|INFO |ServerLibPriv | |SystemInformation: Linux 6.18.0-1-cachyos-bore #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Fri, 05 Dec 2025 17:57:29 +0000 x86_64 Binary: 64bit 2025-12-09 10:46:08.255590|INFO |ServerLibPriv | |Using hardware aes 2025-12-09 10:46:08.256005|INFO |DatabaseQuery | |dbPlugin name: SQLite3 plugin, Version 3, (c)TeamSpeak Systems GmbH 2025-12-09 10:46:08.256030|INFO |DatabaseQuery | |dbPlugin version: 3.11.1 2025-12-09 10:46:08.256180|INFO |DatabaseQuery | |checking database integrity (may take a while) 2025-12-09 10:46:08.256678|CRITICAL|DatabaseQuery | |setSQLfromFile( file:create_sqlite/create_tables.sql) failed

So it took me ages to get to this point already. I had difficulties creating the .ts3server_license_accepted in the 'working directory'. Only understanding by coincidence that ~ in my konsole was the working directory. And that ~ was actually referring to /home/<USER>/ . So I obviously have difficulty interpreting logs and errors in the right context as just telling me to go to /home/<USER>/ is apparently not how linux communicates.

Google as of yet isn't much help as I don't understand enough to translate results to my specific install/version, and because in general google changed from something helpful to something that is there to annoy it's user with the irrelevancy of its results. Chatgpt has proven itself to be less reliable than the crackheads in my neighborhood so that is also not an option.

So anyway I think ts3server is not running. I don't know for sure though. Connecting with the client to 127.0.0.1 doesn't work. And I can't find it in btop++. And the following command (ps aux | grep ts3server) returns: <USER> 24473 0.0 0.0 7088 4152 pts/0 S<+ 12:06 0:00 grep --color=auto ts3server

Which according to some search results means it is running, and to others it means that it is not running. Chatgpt is telling me he 'now understands everything' after I verbally abuse it but still doesn't actually understanding anything.

Anyway the main stuff is in /usr/share/teamspeak3-server/ (which is pretty normal I think). Pacman install gave no errors so why is it not running (or is it?) and how do I fix the sql error (and is it even a problem?)

When and if I finally get it to run I also want to a desktop shortcut to start and stop it. As I only want to host it at most 2 day's a month. But solving the first problem will make my day already. Yes I do want to self host it. As I always did in windows.

Thank you all and have good day!

Hey,

Right now I’m running Bazzite in dual boot with Windows. The main reason is NVIDIA + Secure Boot, since some of the games I currently play require it. This works fine for now.

In about a year, that won’t be the case anymore and I plan to move fully to Linux. At that point Secure Boot won’t matter, so I’ll have full freedom to choose a distro.

I’ve been looking closely at CachyOS because of its performance-oriented approach, but I’m a bit cautious. I can’t help remembering what happened with Manjaro, and I’m wondering if CachyOS could eventually face similar issues.

My question is:

If something were to go wrong with CachyOS in the future, would switching to official Arch repos be a viable way to “fix” things?

My goal with this future reinstall is performance and learning, but this would also be my main PC, so I’d rather avoid having to nuke and reinstall the system every few years.

For context, I’m not new to Linux. I’ve been tinkering with PCs forever and have used everything from mainstream Ubuntu to the early, very rough versions of SteamOS on spare laptops.

Thanks in advance!

https://reddit.com/link/1pi4bdf/video/hqu2hfpap56g1/player

My Weekend Project: DOOM in Terminal with OpenTUI

Inspired by the amazing terminal DOOM ports (doom-ascii, terminal-doom), I wanted to learn more about:

• WebAssembly compilation with Emscripten
• OpenTUI's rendering capabilities
• Modern terminal frameworks

So I built opentui-doom! Tech Stack:

• TypeScript for modern DX
• WebAssembly (WASM) for game logic
• OpenTUI framework for terminal rendering
• doomgeneric as the DOOM base

Easy to try:

Still a work in progress.

Not the first terminal DOOM, but a fun exploration of modern terminal capabilities!

Source code: https://github.com/muhammedaksam/opentui-doom

I bought motorfest in this steam sale but it does not run at all. I get a wine error debug window and it refuses to run. I have already returned the game and refunded, but i am still interested in it.

I have already seen a video of it running well on a steam deck and thought it will work fine. but after i bought it, it kept crashing. I then looked through protonDB and there are people reporting the issue from last month. The issue has also been discussed in the motor fest steam community, but no solution was found.

If motor fest runs well for you, what OS are you using?
I am running the Lenovo Legion Go with bazziteOS.

this is the pop up msg

I wanted to swap to linux and i was pretty sure this would've worked but seems like I'm doin something wrong. help me pls

I recently switched to Linux (pop os to be specific, since I have a nvidia gpu). Im running the game on steam with proton 10 and is playing smooth with zero lags, but my one problem is that there is a constant crackling sound while playing, even if I close all other windows I had open ect. And I also played around with the options in the audio settings.

Is there maybe a command I have to do or install some audio input ect.

Linux specific fixes and improvements

• Resolved an issue that caused Linux clients to display two titlebars.
• Discord now supports hardware accelerated video encoding for AMD graphics cards on Linux through VAAPI, yielding almost twice the quality using less resources.

For almost a year now I've had this really annoying problem that seemed completely random, where my computer would crash on sleep. It does sleep normally most of the time, but then out of the blue it would freeze on sleep - where monitors and the RGB lighting on my keyboard and mouse turn off, but the fans are still going and the lights on the computer stay on and it produces heat - and become completely unresponsive until i force it off. It annoyed the everlasting gobstopper out of me because there seemed to be no pattern - except that it basically never did it immediately after a fresh boot.

Only recently did I finally notice that it seemed to almost correlate to whenever I launched Steam and play a game so I asked Brave AI if that was a known issue and lo and behold it was a persistent issue where Steam would override power management when playing a game but fail to release the override, so the system just hangs on the override. The suggestion was to add SDL_VIDEO_ALLOW_SCREENSAVER=1 to the launch options so I right-click the icon in the start menu select properties and add it to the command, and lo and behold my computer went to sleep properly every single time. At least until it started happening again, where I realised that I was launching steam by launching the game directly which bypassed the start menu option I overrode the override on.

So is this an issue anyone else have discovered? What have they done to fix it properly? This is Linux Mint 22.2 with Nvidia 1660 super btw

I am having a problem with Sober (roblox), for example there are shooter games that have usable vehicles, but when I want to select the secondary weapon it does not allow me to do so no matter how many times I press the buttons, but outside of the vehicle I can use any primary or secondary weapon, does anyone know a solution?

I just got a prebuilt system from cyberpower, and I’m loving it! Got myself CachyOS running everything with no issues.

The question I have is there any benefit to upgrading from 32gb of ram to 64gb on these specs and get better gaming performance? I’m aware of the ram prices so it will be later once things stabilized. Oh, and I am only running one stick of ram I know not happy about it either.

CAS: CyberPowerPC Lian Li Prism Curve 360C ATX Mid-Tower Gaming Case With Tempered Glass Front WHITE with Side Fans

CPU: AMD Ryzen™ 7 Processor 8700F 8C/16T 4.1GHz [Turbo 5.0GHz] 24MB Cache AM5 65W [NPU AMD Ryzen™ AI]

FAN: 240mm Liquid CPU Cooling

HDD: 2TB PCIe NVMe GEN4 M.2 SSD

MEMORY: 32GB DDR5-6000MHz RGB MEMORY

MOTHERBOARD: B850 WIFI + BT Motherboard

POWERSUPPLY: 850 Watts - Standard 80 Plus Gold Certified Power Supply

Everything was working perfectly fine yesterday, but today none of my mouse clicks register in any of my games. No idea what's going on rn. Not even switching proton versions seems to be doing anything so hopefully someone can help me with this. (Sorry for loud background noise as space heater was running.)

I tried using archive and steamrip with no luck. I go through the installation process on lutris like usual but when I launch the game using the 3dm exe the game crashes on the logo. When I try running it using the normal fifa14 exe I get an origin launcher error. Any help would be amazing. Thanks