gamescope doesn’t work so no HDR/VRR

Other than that everything works fine and Wayland’s next major release will fix the HDR issue.

It’s now only some games.

Most of the kernel anti cheats support Linux but it’s up to the individual game developer to enable that feature.

I daily drive Linux, gaming quite a bit and I have a 3080.

There are occasional annoyances, for example when I wake from suspend one of my monitors doesn’t activate until I change display settings (which I do now with a script bound to a hotkey, though a fix is in the pipe). Most of the time it doesn’t cause me any issues.

I’ve kept a Windows install on a partition as a backup in case I have real compatibility issues but I haven’t booted it in weeks (even then, it was to play an anti cheat game, nothing NVIDIA related).

I use Hyprland (on Arch, btw) so I’m technically using unsupported software but I have had no major issues.

On the plus side, I can run local AI easily and DLSS/DLAA, to me, produce higher quality results and with less overhead. Ray tracing is technically in the plus column but most of the time I’d rather just have higher FPS than the visual quality.

I don’t have HDR gaming just yet (my biggest complaint) because gamescope likes to crash, assuming it launches in the first place. However, a Wayland update is going to fix this imminently (next major release) so you can get HDR without gamescope.

Basically, there were trying times in the past but currently (assuming you’re using current versions of things and not some LTS release from a year ago) it’s largely a smooth experience.

I feel this pain.

I’ve been trying to get simple telemetry working over lora on a ESP32-C6, LLMs are largely worthless in this. We gotta fall back to old school RTFM models

I used 3.7 on a project yesterday (refactoring to use a different library). I provided the documentation and examples in the initial context and it re-factored the code correctly. It took the agent about 20 minutes to complete the re-write and it took me about 2 hours to review the changes. It would have taken me the entire day to do the changes manually. The cost was about $10.

It was less successful when I attempted to YOLO the rest of my API credits by giving it a large project (using langchain to create an input device that uses local AI to dictate as if it were a keyboard). Some parts of the codes are correct, the langchain stuff is setup as I would expect. Other parts are simply incorrect and unworkable. It’s assuming that it can bind global hotkeys in Wayland, configuration required editing python files instead of pulling from a configuration file, it created install scripts instead of PKGBUILDs, etcetc.

I liken it to having an eager newbie. It doesn’t know much, makes simple mistakes, but it can handle some busy work provided that it is supervised.

I’m less worried about AI taking my job then my job turning into being a middle-manager for AI teams.

It’s interesting because it lets regular people with little to no training produce software.

It isn’t great software, it doesn’t always work… but considering the amount of software that an untrained person could produce previously was exactly none, it’s a pretty interesting development in technology.

and, it’s only going to get better.

I dunno bro, I can really see how the chicken could be enticed to cross the road by virtue of his chicken instincts. I’m something of a biologist myself

I keep a Windows install in case there is a game that I want to play that works on Linux but I haven’t used it in months (mostly just to play VR)

Haha, yes. It was trying times.

But, if you’re reading this, you’re probably already more than qualified enough to use Linux for gaming. Obviously you’re going to have to learn things but it is very much worth it. Also, the desktop environments look much better imo.

For reference, to play Warcraft 1 multiplayer you joined a chatroom on Battle.net and the chat channel gave everyone a terminal MS-DOS command that you had to copy/paste into the terminal. If anybody had any network more complicated than computer -> modem then it would fail. If anyone failed to connect your game would crash. I was gaming like this at around 10 years old.

Obviously, comparing 2025 Linux to '90s Windows isn’t exactly fair… but gamers are not incapable of dealing with complexity.

Sure, don’t tell your 8 year old cousin to swap from Windows to Linux. But if you’re a smart high school student then you can learn. Like anything, it’ll take some getting used to and you’ll have to deal with frustrations but knowing how to use Linux and, probably more importantly, how to research and solve problems is well worth the effort.

The extreme left and extreme right spaces have a lot in common. Purity tests and instant bans for anyone not sharing the same groupthink is probably the biggest things.

Dude, the number of times I’ve resorted to a reinstall are innumerable. You know a bit more than you did yesterday and that isn’t nothing.

If you want to try a new project that’ll need tinkering with (but won’t break your existing install) look at gamescope.

Currently it’s the only way to get HDR and variable refresh rate to work. It’s what Valve made to get those features into the Steamdeck.

You just run it with

gamescope -- %command%

In your steam launch options. You’ll need to look up the options (otherwise it defaults to 720p@60hz). Ex:

gamescope -w 2160 -- %command%

For 4k. There’s a switch for HDR too but I don’t remember it without looking it up. You can use gamescope to enable FSR in any game, it can apply reshade shaders (so, things like anti aliasing in games that don’t have it natively).

Other than that, any issues you have with a particular game can usually be solved by looking at protondb.com

Keep using the GE-Proton builds of proton for best results.

Have fun 🤓

Yeah, you have Vulkan and Mesa and the GPU drivers are in the kernel. That’s the whole stack (along with Proton).

Before reinstalling completely, run a full system upgrade, I took this from system76s support page:

sudo apt update
# configure any packages partially setup 
sudo dpkg --configure -a 
# fix any missing package dependency 
sudo apt install -f 
# upgrade all packages and dependencies to newest in release 
sudo apt full-upgrade 
# make sure the `pop-desktop` meta package is installed 
sudo apt install pop-desktop

You’re also likely using some flatpak applications, so:

flatpak update

Then reboot.

They want you to reinstall because walking you through a fresh install is just more time efficient for their support staff than trying to troubleshoot system configuration problems (imagine the possible things a random user could change x.x).

I just noticed my reply from my phone didn’t go through x.x

This seems a lot like you’re missing some 32bit libraries. There isn’t a /usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon_icd.i386.json listed in the vulkan logs.

I have no idea how they’d be named in PopOS, but I’d look into vulkan first. You may have the vulkan-radeon 64bit drivers , but not the 32bit. Wine needs the 32bit libraries for the time being.

Check

dpkg -l | grep vulkan

(or post all of dkpg -l if it isn’t too long)

to see if you have the i386 version of the vulkan radeon drivers (for reference, in arch this is lib32-vulkan-radeon, possibly the same in PopOS)

If not install them (apt search vulkan and look for something with vulkan, radeon and i386 in the file name)

99664.262:00d4:00d8:err:xrandr:xrandr14_get_adapters Failed to get adapters

Hmmm, this gets some hits. It seems like it isn’t able to figure out which driver to use.

You can specify the driver that Vulkan should use by adding an environmental variable VK_ICD_FILENAME set the the json file for your card.

Try editing a game and changing the launch options to:

VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon_icd.x86_64.json %command%

I use it in this configuration.

It works well except, if you lose connection temporarily the cloudflared stops responding until some, long (60s or so) timeout period.

A minor annoyance, I usually just manuirestart the service… but I cannot find the setting that is causing this.

No errors, that’s good and also not useful :/

As an aside, this is likely not the problem, but a good tip in general, is to use protonup to install GE-Proton (https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom). It is a community fork which essentially Proton Experimental + community fixes. The System76 article I linked above has the instructions (TL;DR, install protonup (terminal) or protonup-qt (GUI) and they’ll grab it for you and put it in the right directory, restart Steam and select the new version from the Compatibility menu either globally or per-game).

You essentially always want to be using the latest version of Proton unless something that was working breaks in a newer version.

So, next step, more logs:

You can enable proton logging by setting PROTON_LOG=1 as an environmental variable. You can do this per-game by right clicking a game -> Properties -> General and editing the launch options to say

PROTON_LOG=1 %command%

Launch the game and let it crash or whatever. There will be a steam-$APPID.log in your home directory.

Stay with experimental for now.

Do other games show a similar behavior or is it limited to KSP?

BG3 should work fine (was just playing it on Linux about 30m ago, but Arch, btw, etc).

You can get some extra logging from steam, if you exit completely and the, in a terminal, run:

steam -d

It’ll start Steam but output a lot of info to the terminal. The bit we’re interested in isn’t the stuff that it generates while Steam is starting. We want the bit that happens when you press play on a game. It’ll output the information about the important bits (like the Vulkan device, driver versions, monitors, etc )

Make sure there’s no obvious account info in the logs (there shouldn’t be, but always check) and post that.

I’m off to bed but I’ll check in with you tomorrow

OP, I didn’t see if you’d confirmed that you’d enable Steam Play, see this article: https://support.system76.com/articles/linux-gaming

Kerbal Space Program has a Linux native client and a windows client. By default, Steam will try to install the Linux native client, which is using OpenGL and, apparently, doing software rendering.

You could try to troubleshoot why OpenGL is broken, you probably are missing an environmental variable or something to tell it to use a specific device and so it defaults to software. However, this is kind of a moot point. Development stopped on OpenGL in 2017 and so bugs and weirdness will continue to crop up and fixing it won’t resolve your core issue (Which may be that you’re just not using Proton).

If you’re going to game on this system then you should do what most people do and enable Steam Play and let Steam download the Windows version of KSP and run it through Proton (aka Steam’s version of WINE). Often the Windows versions of games are more supported than the Linux native versions and WINE/Proton do an excellent job of translating the underlying windows system calls into Linux-ese. Proton is the primary reason why gaming on Linux works, because it lets you just play the Windows version of games.

Your logs indicate that your graphics card is the default device for Vulkan and so it should just work as soon as you enable Steam Play. If you have any problems with other games (once you verify that you’re using your graphics card) you can look them up on Protondb (https://www.protondb.com/) and see if you need to make any setting changes. KSP looks to have a Gold rating and appears to work with Proton without any changes.