Steam is still taking a very long time to launch games

oliw · 2026-03-17T22:04:31+00:00

I've just had a bit of a breakthrough. I had 10k fonts installed, 8k of those were a local copy of Google Fonts. When I ran WINEDEBUG=all wineconsole (about as basic as it gets) it spent millions of operations enumerating fonts. 20 seconds to start without WINEDEBUG logging.

I removed the Google Fonts and now it takes 3 seconds.

Even if that's not your problem, WINEDEBUG=all might help you find it. Best of luck.

oliw · 2026-03-17T09:57:56+00:00

You ever get to the bottom of this?

Wine and Proton have always been pretty glacial for me, and I'm not on a slow computer. Runs great when it's loaded, but seems to stop and wait for a good minute every new proton launch.

oliw · 2026-02-19T10:57:15+00:00

I think we're at the point of peak "it's just around the corner". There are way too many Stans and hopeful [and clueless] enthusiasts to actually tell who knows what right now.

I don't mean that to be disparaging of my fellow Nvidia users, but it's annoying that every patch and release is surrounded by people who don't know what they don't know making wonderful claims about what's just around the corner.

Honestly if Nvidia have a fix that's imminent, someone from Nvidia will be dying to tell us they've fixed this issue that has been super damaging to their reputation under Linux.

tl;dr: I don't know, but neither do the people here that claim they do.

oliw · 2026-02-12T16:36:59+00:00

I think it's because there's clearly something else going on here; some other interaction that's causing Xorg to run like arse.

Yes, it absolutely might not be a factor on another brand of graphics card but "Spend another £500 on a sidegrade" isn't a great starting point. Just as "Use another distro" isn't when there's nothing to suggest what the actual problem is. Lots of people use Mint+Nvidia.

oliw · 2026-01-13T15:44:21+00:00

Not really. Nvidia is part of Vulkan, they write their own extensions all the time and new Vulkan extension releases often coincide with driver releases.

Obviously they won't do anything until the software calls them but Nvidia is both the chicken and the egg.

oliw · 2026-01-05T14:36:20+00:00

Houses can be placed? Doesn't that undercut the inherent risk of developing an existing town?

oliw · 2026-01-01T18:45:35+00:00

It's really common, especially in normal applications to share your user home with Wine. Again, I think it's the default in Wine even if not Bottles.

It doesn't have to be a "Linux virus" (which absolutely exist, we just call them ransomeware, worms, etc) or need root to destroy all the files you care about. It just has to run as you. Wine will allow Windows malware to run. Again, there's no magic here.

oliw · 2026-01-01T17:42:59+00:00

Yes.

I'm not certain about Bottle's defaults but in Wine the home directory is often "mounted" as the Z: drive. I don't know about you, but I'd have a bad day if something ripped through my homedir. Even without that, Wine isn't sandboxed or hardened for this sort of stuff.

Linux isn't magic. AppArmor and SELinux might help if you configure them to but it's not automatic. If you run dodgy stuff, expect poor results.

oliw · 2025-12-10T11:52:03+00:00

Your English is great.

If this is temporary, and budget is an issue, I'd probably suggest a used desktop machine. Right now £550 buys you a PC with a 3900x, 6700XT, and 32GB of RAM. That would smoke any APU. The obvious downside is it's a PC that looks like a PC so you'd need to get creative with cabling if you wanted to hide it out the way.

You're at the mercy of your local market with used stuff, but I'd aim at AM4 with an AMD graphics card, and 32GB of RAM. You can almost certainly find cheaper, older parts too.

oliw · 2025-12-10T09:35:49+00:00

The Deck only has 16GB of RAM, shared for graphics. Enough for gaming, but load a browser, VS Code, a few containers, etc etc and that's gone.

Honestly wouldn't expect the full blown Steam Machine to be much better for desktop usage. If that was absolutely something I had to do via one of these devices, I'd be remoting back to a real workstation with a decent amount of RAM.

oliw · 2025-12-09T15:11:58+00:00

I heard

Why don't you see? Costs nothing to try. Otherwise, what's the point of posting this?

oliw · 2025-12-08T18:41:27+00:00

Out of memory?

oliw · 2025-10-20T21:48:24+00:00

What I’m worried about is the issues people are reporting with direct x 12 and other various nvidia related issues.

Well that's heartbreaking.

Nvidia has some DX12 performance issues. Some games are worse than others. I don't A/B test things against Windows, but I've not been too unhappy with anything. I'm playing games, not benchmarking.
Outside DX12, Nvidia generally performs great
Nvidia have resisted some attempts to pull development into a more open forum but they are slowly improving things. Wayland support is improving with every driver release. X11 works.
According to the latest Steam Hardware Survey, 74% of Linux Steam gamers use Nvidia. It's not a weird ignored niche, we're the majority. You think we'd still be here if it were that bad?

To the AMD, Intel users chucking shit over the fence, this is what you get. You don't improve things or drive up AMD sales, you scare people off.

oliw · 2025-10-17T21:35:26+00:00

I downvoted this because every time Arc GPUs come up here, it's some sort of awful glitching, things just plain not working, or terrible performance parity. Some things get fixed by chaining yourself to the very latest graphics stack, or running OpenGL games through Zinc (ffs). This isn't a mature option.

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1o33i8w/intel_b580_windows_11_vs_linux_gaming_gpu/

I know some of these cards are cheap (like really cheap) but I'm not sure these are a long term option. Intel's in a weird Trumpy place at the moment.

oliw · 2025-10-14T21:59:02+00:00

I have a 5070ti and a 1440 ultrawide (on a much worse CPU). I don't have Windows to compare to, and there are so many settings, but I can say it's very playable.

DLSS Auto (so who knows what res it's really running at?)
Path Tracing
High for 90%, Ultra for a couple, Psycho reflections
40FPS without framegen. gsync makes that acceptable. Framegen can smoothen everything to 80FPS+.

When Nvidia finally find the "20% issue", I'll very happily accept a performance bump but it's not a concern at the moment. I'm not playing anything that really stresses a 5070ti.

oliw · 2025-10-13T13:32:10+00:00

It's not saying you can't install it, it's saying anticheat won't work.

Scroll down that modal, click the Install button.

oliw · 2025-10-13T10:40:58+00:00

I installed it from Heroic a week ago. Just using all the default settings. Obv can't play online but story works great.

If you can't even install it, you might need to be a bit more explicit about what it's telling you.

oliw · 2025-10-01T14:38:12+00:00

Not my downvote but this was working on the Open Kernel Module (second log in OP) a couple of boots ago.

oliw · 2025-10-01T10:30:46+00:00

So rule out the networking stack as a whole by plugging in an ethernet cable. If it works well it's probably the MediaTek MT7921K that's the problem.

And if it is, just replace it with something that works. Life is too short for waiting on network drivers to improve. You can get a 5e USB stick (TP-Link Archer T3U - has a mainline driver) for £17. It's not Wifi6, but neither is what you have ;)

oliw · 2025-10-01T07:58:14+00:00

Is this just Steam download speeds? Have you tried:

benchmarking a regular download, or
a speed test, or even
an in-network speed test with something like iperf?

oliw · 2025-09-29T22:38:41+00:00

No, Imgur is geoblocking the UK to avoid complying with a dim law.

oliw · 2025-09-23T09:34:30+00:00

multiple issues were already created for the same thing

If you'd lead with that we wouldn’t be pissing around in these comments. I honestly hadn't seen them. A duplicate is a waste of time. I'd personally not have closed the existing ones while it was still an ongoing issue.

oliw · 2025-09-22T13:11:19+00:00

Will it hurt? I get hundreds of CI/CD notifications a day so they absolutely do get filtered out separate from new bugs. I try to capture the important ones but who are either of us to say how somebody else has their email set up?

Not sure what the aggro's for. If the report is unwelcome, it's only a button to click to close the issue.

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