EDIT: The issue was caused by my SSD being formatted in exFAT, which doesn’t support symlinks. I backed up my SSD & reformatted it to btrfs, and then I could install .NET without hassle & the game runs!

Original Post:

I’m having an issue running this game on linux, every time I click play in Steam I get the following popup:

“you must install .NET desktop runtime to run this application”

Clicking “yes” takes me to download a Windows .exe which of course can’t run on linux. I manually installed the .NET runtime following linux instructions here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux-debian but the game still gives me this error.

Other things I’ve tried:

  • Reinstalling BG3
  • Completely deleting every file from steamapps/common for BG3 & reinstalling
  • Reinstalling Proton
  • Skipping the launcher
  • Tried with proton experimental, 9, 8, 7

My launch args are STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=/home/user/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata gamemoderun %command% --skip-launcher

On protondb everybody else seems to be running the game fine, but I don’t understand how to get past this error.

  • @JozzoOPEnglish
    1•17 days ago

    Reporting back!

    Reformatted with btrfs, steam now does this when I open the game (didn’t before):

    anddd it works! Can’t believe this whole headache was just exfat all along lol!

    Thank you for your help :D