Proton freezes my PC playing any Steam games after a minute or two

[Pogi]

Recently I've just moved to Linux on EndeavourOS, every other games running on Wine plays just perfectly fine, but for some reason any Steam games or non-Steam games running on Proton compatibility layer will freeze my computer to the point it'll be unresponsive and I have to press the power button.

The game would run fine for a time, from 1 second to 5 minutes, but will eventually freeze. I have tried uninstalling Steam, deleting its files including the Proton libraries, which seemed to work since I get to run Baldur's Gate for +10 minutes, but the next launch, my PC froze after 5 minutes in. I have also tried other versions such as the Experimental version.

Any help or insight into the issue would be appreciated.

[D. Flame]

https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940/

I would read through that first. It is always a good first step.

Are you running the system package, flatpak or some other version of Steam? I have had the most success with the flatpak.

Also, why would you use Arch instead of something more user friendly like Mint or Ubuntu?

[Pogi]

It's not necessarily tied to Baldur's Gate 3 since it happens to every other games as well, but I guess I may as well try, since I swear computers can be pretty magical.

I installed Steam from pacman, but is there any reason it'd be any different if I were to install it from Flatpak?

As for Arch, mainly because my friend recommended it, though I don't see anything wrong with Arch. Sure takes a bit to learn, but I get used to it.

[D. Flame]

Originally posted by Pogi:

It's not necessarily tied to Baldur's Gate 3 since it happens to every other games as well, but I guess I may as well try, since I swear computers can be pretty magical.

I installed Steam from pacman, but is there any reason it'd be any different if I were to install it from Flatpak?

As for Arch, mainly because my friend recommended it, though I don't see anything wrong with Arch. Sure takes a bit to learn, but I get used to it.

Arch is just less user friendly versus something like Mint (Cinnamon), which would feel more natural to someone used to Windows.

Flatpak would be different because it is sandboxed. It downloads all the requirements it need to work and keeps them isolated from the rest of your system. Meanwhile the system package shares the files from your OS. Meaning that if steam needs one version of a library to work, and your OS needs a different version to work, you could start running into problems. Whereas that would not be a problem with the flatpak version since the OS would be using its own library, and Steam would be using its own separate library, aka they would not be interfering with one another.

[Pogi]

Ohhh that is such a nice thing to know, thanks, I'll start with that first then try to fiddle with launch options after.

[D. Flame]

Originally posted by Pogi:

Ohhh that is such a nice thing to know, thanks, I'll start with that first then try to fiddle with launch options after.

Cool, good luck.

Also:
https://www.flatpak.org/setup/EndeavourOS

[Marlock]

it looks likevyou have a memory leak and ram slowly fills up

check item 4.1 here:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1636417404917541481/

also try disabling steam overlay or maybe steam's gpu accelerated web UI, or try enabling both the low performance and low bandwidth modes (all of those in steam settings)

[D. Flame]

Originally posted by Marlock:

it looks likevyou have a memory leak and ram slowly fills up

check item 4.1 here:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1636417404917541481/

also try disabling steam overlay or maybe steam's gpu accelerated web UI, or try enabling both the low performance and low bandwidth modes (all of those in steam settings)

Keep in mind that guide is over 4 years old.

The guide suggest not using Flatpak, but flatpaks have matured, and a flatpak is the only way I could get steam working properly since the last update.

[Pogi]

Figured the issue, for some reason KDE Plasma reaaally hates Proton so it freaks out very hard and spams error on journalctl when I run any games on Proton. I never thought this would be the issue since my friend is on KDE Plasma as well, but oh well, I should've paid attention to the log better lol.

[Pogi]

Thanks you two for helping as well

[D. Flame]

Originally posted by Pogi:

Figured the issue, for some reason KDE Plasma reaaally hates Proton so it freaks out very hard and spams error on journalctl when I run any games on Proton. I never thought this would be the issue since my friend is on KDE Plasma as well, but oh well, I should've paid attention to the log better lol.

That's strange since the steam deck also runs Plasma.

[lsdninja]

As happy as I would be to see KDE up and disappear, you should probably still investigate further now that you have a solid lead…

[Pogi]

Originally posted by lsdninja:

As happy as I would be to see KDE up and disappear, you should probably still investigate further now that you have a solid lead…

I genuinely have no idea what's going on other than there were ♥♥♥♥ ton of Plasmashell spam, like these;

 plasmashell[14697]: ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/pogi/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored.

plasmashell[12861]: [12861:1127/044200.219036:ERROR:shared_image_factory.cc(575)] Could not find SharedImageBackingFactory with params: usage: Gles2|Raster|DisplayRead|Scanout, format: RG_88, share_between_threads: 0, gmb_type: shared_memory

kwin_x11[11767]: kwin_core: XCB error: 152 (BadDamage), sequence: 12265, resource id: 16778116, major code: 143 (DAMAGE), minor code: 3 (Subtract)

plasmashell[13017]: [13017:1127/044532.359079:ERROR:command_buffer_proxy_impl.cc(325)] GPU state invalid after WaitForGetOffsetInRange.

plasmashell[12657]: [12657:1127/044532.387829:ERROR:gpu_process_host.cc(991)] GPU process exited unexpectedly: exit_code=512

And I know it's not Steam overlay since I have it off.

[Marlock]

it's most likely steam throwing you a red herring... this happens occasionaly on Gnome too

looks like it has a bug somewhere that makes it call the shell library functions improperly in very specific scenarios

at the very least you should ignore the overlay error and focus on the later (but for the gnome errors i can tell you they vanished after the user fixed the actual reason steam was throwing a fit and it was not nearly related to an incompatibility with gnome libs)

[𝈌𝈤𝈖ʍ˽ρѻρρџ]

Dunno if you solved your problem already, since I'm late to the party.. But my first suggestion would be:

M'yeah, it's not plasmashell; as it is just the shell, through which Steam's initiating launch command is run; in order to set up its environmental-variables..
Like the cmd on my steam-launcher icon:

 sh -c 'STEAM_FRAME_FORCE_CLOSE=1 steam -console %U' 

" (I added the -console argument to keep an eye out for game debuggery) Too bad the newest version of steam requires for you to first visit the console-tab for it to start spewing out log msgs.

But uhm, though the latest steps to proceeding OS-versions have autom. included the "foreign" i386-architechture (aka: x86_32-bit).. I am not familiar with EndeavorOS, but on previous iterations of Debian-based systems, the user needed to enable the 32-bit packages.
Here in Debian-based land, it was a simple command: " sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 "
But for you Archie, I had to crackle mi` knuckles, and use the ol' searchinmachina:
..And this was the result: https://linuxiac.com/how-to-play-games-on-arch-linux-using-steam/
So it would seem, in there, same as here.. you need to enable the 32-bit libraries.. As Steam is one of the programs which needs 'em.. Nor would I doubt if it was the main reason for the 32-bit packages to be available on fresh installs as of at least Linux Mint (21.× and onward)

Since this seems to already be turning into some kind of journal, I might as well ponder a bit on flatpak as well..

Rest is just ranting about flatpaks

Mjeah, for default use flatpaks can just simply work.. But since they take their whole library dependancies with 'em; if you have onlly one program as flatpak, it can be almost as if you're lugging a whole 'nother filesystem with it. (Biggest added storage requirements I've seen for flatpak have been >3GB) But if you have many different programs in flatpak, it can end up being only like few kB to add another one..

But 'coz they're in a close system, troubleshooting is much more of a pain with 'em.. since you first have to atleast `sorta` know how to add permissions for file-sharing, etc in flatpaks.
So, f.ex if you have Steam-games across multiple drives, you most likely need to make those available through flatpak's own cmd-structure.. Otherwise you most likely only see what's inside your .steam directory, and some tmp and Downloads directories from your /home/*/
The previous two paragraphs are also a bonus, in sense of security

Not to mention part of the core philosophy of *nix-based OS´s was "One program does one thing well, and any other program in the system can share it to complete it's task." As opposed to Bill Gates´s willy, aka: Microsoft, where one .executable more often than not, contains it dependencies with it. which can result in bloat with the same libraries in every program. And opposed to: one, best deemed program solution available for the system(*Nix); Every program needs to find their own solutions(MSWin).
These of course are generalities, and one can find examples of each and opposite.

[Soyuz107]

I tried running your command and it didn't work is there something else I need to do?

Originally posted by ѡɑɾʍ˽ρѻρρџ:

Here in Debian-based land, it was a simple command: " sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 "

(I'm running Kubuntu (ubuntu with kde)).