I have a problem with Borderlands 2 and Portal. If I run native version game crashes soon after launching. If I run Windows version with Proton game doeasn’t launch at all. I tried solutions from ProtonDB but none of them worked. I’m new to Linux gaming so I’m not sure what to do.

I have Intel i9 11th generation CPU, Nvidia 1650 GPU and 16GB RAM.

Fix: I installed lib32-nvidia-utils. Now I can run native version of Portal and Windows version of Borderlands 2 with Proton 7.0-6 (haven’t tried other versions of Proton).

  • Bo7a
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    138 months ago

    My usual ‘shot in the dark’ when someone mentions windows versions: Is the game data on a shared NTFS partition? If so, move it to a native linux FS like ext4 and try again.

    • @[email protected]
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      78 months ago

      This is good advise. My husband just installed Linux as a dual boot on his system over the weekend. He was having trouble with games that worked fine on my system until we re-downloaded them onto the Linux drive. Then they worked fine.

    • @cetvrti_magiOP
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      58 months ago

      I don’t have any shared partitions.

      • Bo7a
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        68 months ago

        Still worth a shot to mention.

        Proton just doesn’t seem to like any data on an NTFS partition, but the error message is ugly and buried so I mentioned it in all of these types of posts.

    • @cetvrti_magiOP
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      28 months ago

      I know that Linux port is abandonned but like I said in the post Windows version doesn’t run at all.

  • ThePancakeExperiment
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    78 months ago

    Do you have MangoHud installed? Last week I couldn’t run any proton game on my system until I uninstalled it/ removed the MANGOHUD=1 variable haven’t had this problem before, but something broke. Proton and wine were stuck at launching, no error messages/ logs, etc. drove me nuts.

    • @Buffalox
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      28 months ago

      There is nothing in Borderlands 2 that requires proton-ge. Using default native should absolutely work, and so should proton for the Windows version. His system is fucked up somehow.

    • @cetvrti_magiOP
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      28 months ago

      I’m using X11 and closed source Nvidia driver. I’ll check driver version and VRR when I return home.

      • @[email protected]
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        68 months ago

        You have a 16xx series card, Proton 8+ have a problem with these cards (thanks to Nvidia), so switch to an older Proton version like Proton 7, should work.

    • @cetvrti_magiOP
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      18 months ago

      My driver version is 550.67 and VRR is enabled.

      • @[email protected]
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        18 months ago

        You could try 545 or 535 series drivers. Stability can vary greatly between card model, driver, compositor and kernel version.

  • 520
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    28 months ago

    You want to be using Proton for BL2 regardless. The Linux client isn’t updated, meaning no cross play and you can’t use the final DLC. Also it’s performance is shit compared to Proton

  • MentalEdge
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    18 months ago

    Do other games run?

    I’ve seen steam proton get into a state where it won’t run anything.

    It was on someone else’s PC and I didn’t get a chance to solve it as they went back to windows.

    But like others have said, running the windows versions of these games by using proton is the way to go.

    What distro are you on?

    • @cetvrti_magiOP
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      8 months ago

      I had no issues with other games I played. I use EndeavourOS.

      • MentalEdge
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        48 months ago

        Good. So you’ve confirmed that games can and do run on your system, both natively and using proton.

        Next, I would try deleting the corresponding compatdata and shadercache folders for the games, to reset the games prefix and shaders. These are one folder up from the folder where the actual game files are, and the folders within have numbered names that match the ID of the game. (Which you can see in the update tab in game properties).

        Simply delete the correct folders and steam will redo the proton setup for a game and recompile the shaders.

        On a sidenote, I recommend installing proton-ge-custom from the AUR, it installs, keeps up to date, and makes available proton GE for you to use in steam and heroic, should you ever need a version with fixes that valve proton doesn’t come with.

          • MentalEdge
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            8 months ago

            Darn.

            At this point I’d be looking at logs. Two ways to go about this.

            The first is to launch steam from a terminal (close it, then just enter steam in a terminal) and then try to launch the game. Steam will spew out lines about what is going on into the terminal.

            The other way is to enable proton logs, which can be done by adding PROTON_LOG=1 %command% in the launch options for the game. Then when you attempt to run the game, a logfile should appear in you home folder.

            I’m also assuming you’ve tried multiple proton versions? If you haven’t, do that.

            • @cetvrti_magiOP
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              18 months ago

              It seems like game breaks here.

              • MentalEdge
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                68 months ago

                Archwiki on Vulkan. This information should allow you to verify that Vulkan is correctly set up and working.

                If that isn’t the problem, move onto proton logs, as they will be more detailed.

            • @cetvrti_magiOP
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              18 months ago

              I also got this error for Vulkan while launching the Steam.

  • @Buffalox
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    8 months ago

    Those 2 games are extremely solid in my experience, haven’t had a crash ever in either of them.
    I’ve played Borderlands 2 for 744 hours over many years with different hardware without a problem, except that I can’t get SHiFT keys to work in the Linux version, so if I want to use SHiFT, I switch to Proton for that. Both work flawlessly otherwise. I have only tried Portal native though.
    I’m currently using the Manjaro distro with an old Ryzen 5 1600 CPU, Radeon RX 6800 XT GPU, and 16 Gig Ram.
    My wife however uses Nvidia GTX 1080 ti and earlier GTX 970, and both games worked perfectly for her too using Debian with both cards. My wife also played lots of portal both 1 and 2 with Nvidia cards.

    In short those 2 games should work fine out of the box, with both Nvidia and Radeon. So maybe you have some hardware problem? Or something with your installation was screwed up somehow?

  • Victor
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    18 months ago

    Would you maybe try the flatpak version of Steam? That has worked great for me. No complaints.