[Debian 12] Steam won't launch any games, natively or through Proton

[Vivy-NX]

After some unrelated technical difficulties where I had to reinstall Debian 12 to my system and reload everything from a backup, as well as some graphics card driver issues, I have not been able to run any Steam games. As it is now, I can currently only launch non-Steam games in my library, while Steam games never launch, whether they support Linux natively or they are being run through Proton. A select number of native titles work if I navigate directly to /steamapps/common/ and open them, i.e. Terraria, but it's less convenient, possibly breaks multiplayer through Steam also, (though I'm not sure) and some native games i.e. Half Life do not open either way. Given that I never had this issue with Steam before on this hardware and operating system I suspect reinstalling it may fix the issues but I'd like to avoid that if possible so if anyone knows anything that may help in my situation I would appreciate it.

[grzegorz77]

Originally posted by Vivy-NX:

[Debian 12] Steam won't launch any games, natively or through Proton

After some unrelated technical difficulties where I had to reinstall Debian 12 to my system and reload everything from a backup, as well as some graphics card driver issues, I have not been able to run any Steam games. As it is now, I can currently only launch non-Steam games in my library, while Steam games never launch, whether they support Linux natively or they are being run through Proton. A select number of native titles work if I navigate directly to /steamapps/common/ and open them, i.e. Terraria, but it's less convenient, possibly breaks multiplayer through Steam also, (though I'm not sure) and some native games i.e. Half Life do not open either way. Given that I never had this issue with Steam before on this hardware and operating system I suspect reinstalling it may fix the issues but I'd like to avoid that if possible so if anyone knows anything that may help in my situation I would appreciate it.

Maybe start here, you'll probably find something.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/4840896974228634935/
(Help for new people to Linux?)


Today or yesterday someone wrote a parameter here that will allow you to run a steam game with error logging, it's probably a very good idea.

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edit:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/591758125124634162/#c591758125124642854
>>>

Originally posted by Kaii:

Is the game on an NTFS filesystem?

If that's not the issue, you can set PROTON_LOG=1 %command% as a launch option, Steam will create a log file in your home folder. Usually helpful.

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There was a case once, I remember it, but I don't remember the solution, it was 6-12 months back.

[WarnerCK]

Originally posted by Vivy-NX:

some graphics card driver issues, I have not been able to run any Steam games.

These are likely strongly related.

[Vivy-NX]

I'm already mostly familiar with the resources in the first discussion for people new to Linux, as I've been using Debian for a year. I've tried everything on the Debian wiki page for troubleshooting Steam, and none of it helped.
I tried running a Proton game with PROTON_LOG=1 %command%, but I don't think it even got so far as to create a log. All I found was a log from a year ago when I was troubleshooting something else that I ended up resolving later.

Re: graphics card issues- The laptop I'm running on has an integrated Intel graphics card which has always worked just fine with Mesa, as well as a Nvidia card, which as of late has been having some weird issues where it would freeze on shutdown / sleep, which creeped me out. I've mostly been running with the Nvidia driver uninstalled as late; I recently tried reinstalling it but the sleep / shutdown issues were apparently still there, I'm just presuming no updates that fixed that specific situation have come out, so I uninstalled it and went back to running off of the Mesa driver. My past experience has been that a lot of things still worked fine when I didn't have the Nvidia driver - I only ran into issues when I was running Pseudoregalia through Proton and presumably for some Unreal Engine related reason it kept giving me a "Fatal Error!" on boot. Native games did boot, and a lot of other games through Proton still worked too. I did eventually get Pseudoregalia running once I got my Nvidia card fixed, at least at the point where everything else was still working. That said, I don't wanna worry about the Nvidia stuff yet for the time being since the problem also exists without it.

I can post a log of what happens in Steam when I try to run a game by running Steam through the console:

Fossilize INFO: Autogroup scheduling is not enabled on this kernel. Will rely entirely on nice().
chdir "/home/vivian/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/common/Terraria"
ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/vivian/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/vivian/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/vivian/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_64/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64): ignored.
pid 35903 != 35902, skipping destruction (fork without exec?)
Game Recording - would start recording game 105600, but recording for this game is disabled
Adding process 35901 for gameID 105600
Adding process 35902 for gameID 105600
Game Recording - game stopped [gameid=105600]
Removing process 35902 for gameID 105600
Removing process 35901 for gameID 105600
Adding process 35902 for gameID 105600

And here's attempting to run a game through Proton for good measure:

chdir "/home/vivian/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/common/UFO 50"
Game Recording - would start recording game 1147860, but recording for this game is disabled
Adding process 36168 for gameID 1147860
ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/vivian/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/vivian/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/vivian/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_64/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64): ignored.
pid 36170 != 36169, skipping destruction (fork without exec?)
WARNING: discarding _NET_WM_PID 6 as invalid for X11 window - use specialized XCB_X11_TO_PID function!
Adding process 36169 for gameID 1147860
Game Recording - game stopped [gameid=1147860]
Removing process 36169 for gameID 1147860
Removing process 36168 for gameID 1147860
Removing process 36110 for gameID 1147860

Some other information that may be important: I am running the latest security updates for Debian 12 (bookworm, stable) with KDE Plasma 5.27.5. I installed Steam through the steam-installer package, as instructed on
the Debian wiki.[wiki.debian.org]

[grzegorz77]

It seems to me that this is a hardware problem. I don't know what to advise you, maybe it would be good to start by cleaning the laptop from dust and changing the thermal paste. But I don't think it will help. Maybe it will extend the life of what is still functional.

You can also play around with the drivers, or with installing a new system.
I don't like such advice either.

You can also install windows, which is sometimes less sensitive to hardware problems.
(Now I'm biting my fingers that are trying to write it.)


But maybe someone wiser will come along and write something that will lead to a better solution.


edit:
I assume that you used the advice from the link you provided:

# rm ~/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6
# rm ~/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1
# rm ~/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1
# rm ~/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6
# rm ~/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libxcb.so.1
# rm ~/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgpg-error.so.0

I assume that it is good to do it from the level of:
su -l
(lowercase L)

And that you repeated this step after every mess with mesa and steam. Or steam updates.

... And that you know that it should be pasted without #

[Vivy-NX]

I have tried sudo removing the libraries mentioned on the Debian wiki there. It didn't fix the issue, unfortunately.
Personally I'm still a little skeptical that this is necessarily 100% a hardware issue, because of how specifically the issues are localized to my current installation of Steam, some games can be launched if navigated to directly in the /steamapps/common files, as well as non-Steam games generally working just well as usual, whether standalone or through another launcher like Itch, or (to some extent) standalone Windows games through Wine. Running games through a Windows VM takes a performance hit but otherwise also works without issue.

If there's nothing else to try, I'll see if fully reinstalling Steam does any good. Hopefully I can fix this soon. If not I'll probably have to try and resurrect my Windows partition on this laptop and do most of my gaming there instead, since the Windows partition has generally been able to play games without issue broadly speaking.

[grzegorz77]

Debian is a little different from its clones, here you have to behave carefully.

Sudo gives you root privileges.
But su -l gives you permissions and environment variables.
Ubuntu, it won't notice it, but in debian you can do something differently than it is intended, I had such surprising cases.
With rm it won't make a difference, but when you install something it can do.

Steam is quite strange, it has a very inelegant approach.
It does not use system libraries, but duplicates them with its own.
When you reinstall it, don't do it with sudo but with root or as root using su.
Maybe it won't change anything, but it can cause such a strange problem.

I have no idea what's going on. But it looks like graphics, and drivers.

The wiki topic you provided was quite extensive, maybe it's worth reviewing it again.
In this link from me, people also wrote interesting things.

[Vivy-NX]

update: Fully deleted /.steam/ and the other steam-related files in /home/, reinstalled the steam-related packages, and ran steam-installer again. Terraria now boots like a charm once again. More testing maybe is necessary to make sure everything else still works normal but I think it's fixed.
edit: other games including ones with proton work too! yayy ^_^