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Comment by sosodev | Hacker News Reader

It's unfortunate but the Steam experience on Linux seems to be progressively getting worse (outside of Steam Deck ofc). The Steam client is often borderline unusable for Linux users. You can find many issue threads on GitHub reporting client freezes and crashes.

It seems like a big part of the issues is a lack of maintenance. TF2 would actually run better on Linux via Proton but VAC isn't enabled so you can't join the vast majority of servers.

Valve also has existing Source engine tooling that allows Linux ports to drop OpenGL entirely (dxvk-native as used by Portal 2 and L4D2) but they haven't added it to TF2... :(

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> You can find many issue threads on GitHub reporting client freezes and crashes.

The fact that these are happening does not necessarily mean the client is getting worse. For example, it could mean that more people are installing Steam for Linux. There is no baseline to say it's getting worse, because nobody opens an issue saying "all working here."

In my experience, the only issue I have on Wayland is this: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/7245 (workaround: disable animated avatars) (edit: all AMD machine)

> outside of Steam Deck ofc

There is nothing special about the Steam Deck. It's just another Linux machine.

> TF2

I don't play any Source games, but I could see TF2 having issues because it's in maintenance mode. If it is bjorked that has nothing to do with Steam.

> There is nothing special about the Steam Deck. It's just another Linux machine.

That's not true. It's a read-only linux on a fixed hardware platform, which is a vaaastly different beast than the myriad of hardware/software combinations that exist out there in the wild.

> It's a read-only linux on a fixed hardware platform

I have heard that argument about macOS a lot, and this is nothing like that. There isn't some "special sauce er... Source" that they apply to their platform. It's just GPL Linux. They may have avoided bad decisions like relying on NVIDIA for Linux gaming, but that's hardly the level of ownership that you see with other vertical integrations. If I use an AMD CPU (or Intel, which would be arguably better) and AMD GPU, there is no reason why my PC couldn't be just as "first-party" as the Steam Deck.

Wine/Proton ultimately access the GPU through DRM, that remains the same for Valve hardware or custom-built hardware. Both Steam and Wine/Proton currently render via X11 (via XWayland if necessary), on both my PC and the Steam Deck.

I feel like there is a gap of understanding how a HAL works here.

> It's just GPL Linux.

"Just" GPL Linux encompasses myriad library versions, kernel versions, driver versions and varied hardware.

> I feel like there is a gap of understanding how a HAL works here.

Just because you have a HAL doesn't mean that you don't get different behavior and crashes with different numbers of CPUs/concurrency or other hardware beneath. Modern GPUs are also pretty complicated beasts, and assuming that's fully abstracted is a mistake.

And this all leaves aside the myriad of other problems you can have with the ensemble of software running on the machine that interacts with the game (directly or indirectly).

Being able to test and make one restricted platform work well is a far different beast than covering the huge mass of variation users create on their own machines.

I feel like there is a gap in understanding of how commercial software deployment goes.

When you have a platform like Steam Deck, it's the platform that gets tested by QA, and the platform that most of your devs are building for every day.

Sure, a linux machine is made out of just a CPU and a GPU. Even if that would be the case, what about the software combinations that can exist and that the SteamDeck simplifies?

In the gamedev world I heard a lot of people not wanting to support linux because they never know which glibc version to support, which mesa version to support, which hardware GPUs to support, which graphical API to support, etc.

Cutting down that matrix (and I just mentioned the most egregious examples) to only one element is invaluable in ensuring your users have a bug free experience.

True, I don't have enough data to really make that claim. I can say that my own hardware hasn't changed in ~4 years and I've been using Steam for Linux since I built this machine. It's only within the last year or so that I started having major issues with the client.

> there is nothing special about the steam deck

How is first party support for the hardware and software stack "nothing special"?

> If it is bjorked that has nothing to do with Steam.

Maybe it's not directly related to the rest of my comment but it's related to the OP. I also think it's indicative of Valve's issues with Linux.

> How is first party support for the hardware and software stack "nothing special"?

Because the vast majority of that stack (the kernel, GPU driver, window manager, and so forth) has nothing to do with Valve. They might contribute drivers to the kernel (I'm not sure if they actually do - I would expect AMD to be doing that), but otherwise it's an Arch-based distro with the same Steam client and Proton runtime that everyone else is using.

Yes, the Steam Deck is using a fairly standard stack and the default client but you're missing the point. Valve directly tests the Steam Deck and prioritizes bug fixes for it. When users report issues with other setups it often takes months for the identified bug to be fixed if it ever is.

I run Steam in a Docker container of Ubuntu 22.04 for reasons like this. Also my actual system isn't polluted with 32-bit libs, Steam can't rm-rf my home directory and games can't steal files from my home directory (homedir inside the container is a separate directory on the host), and access to X and dbus is restricted (dbus socket not forwarded, X socket is from a nested Xephyr instance) so nothing can be stolen from there either.

Edit: More details in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634854

Is there a guide for this? I'd really like to isolate Steam from the rest of my system

flatpak is probably the easiest way to do this.

I can’t see how native Linux support is getting worse. Linux users are good at bug reporting. Maybe some developers should care more about compatibility. And yes, especially the heterogeneous setups used by some makes support difficult.

I’m worried that Valve puts too much resources into Proton (derivate of WINE) instead of tooling for native ports. Yes, Proton is needed to provide initial compatibility. But Proton is another layer of complexity (more bugs, integration, system resources) which requires more programming. I started playing CS again after it was ported natively in 2014, it runs well and all issues with WINE were gone.

If Proton becomes to “good” we end up in a situation with a high maintenance burden for Valve. Game developers will rely on it and Valve has all the constant work. Instead game developers should treat Linux as first-class platform for AAA-Titles, for which the need appropriate APIs, compatibility and tooling. As Valve does itself support Linux as first-class platform from HL2 to CSGO. The target shall be official support from the very first day.

Anyway. Looks like Valve has chosen a special implementation for TF2? What I miss here is a link to a bug report. Ideally opened months ago :)

Game studios already know Linux distributions quite well on the server, and most AAA games on Android are basically only using the NDK, meaning ISO C and C++, OpenGL ES, Vulkan, OpenSL.

Besides that, PlayStation OS is based on FreeBSD. Even if the 3D API is different, it is just yet another backend.

They don't port them, because the QA and support aren't worth the sales, that is about it.

I think Valve has a financial incentive to keep Proton compatibility in a positive state, as it increases sales of the Steam Deck and encourages players to remain in their ecosystem. Or, I think it's more likely than the majority of AAA game developers having a financial incentive to maintain Linux versions of their products.

Devil's advocate, I use Steam on Fedora and have had 0 issues. Very rarely freezes or crashes. It's probably the most stable application I use daily.

I use Steam on Fedora as well and I notice a lot of jank with the Steam client (Nvidia 1080ti). Dropdown menus popping through windows, sound may or may not work for videos, freezing, etc. It's usable but it's not very pleasant.

Just for GPU comparison I'm on an AMD RX card so it could be an Nvidia issue which is known to be jank on Linux.

The client seems to be very suseptible to I/O stalls and even randomly just locks up for a few seconds by itself every once in a while on my end for some reason. That in itself would be fine if it wouldn't also directly affect games launched through Steam.

I also use Steam on Fedora, and I've not had any issues with Stardew Valley, Factorio, Celeste, N++, Undertale, and others. I remember having a brief issue with Portal, but I was able to resolve it. Overall, I've had a good experience.

It seems to work perfectly for some people. I’ve regularly had issues with the client not rendering at all, freezing, and crashing on Pop_OS 22.04 LTS with an nvidia GTX 1660ti.

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