I'm running Kubuntu 25, which I chose for its stability and nice appearance. My system has an AMD RX 580 and an Intel I5-12400, so I believe the drivers are fine. All my game drives are formatted as Exfat. I installed Steam using Flatpak because the installation through the KDE Discover page wouldn't work. Until now, everything seemed okay. However, when I try to launch any game—whether it's native to Linux or uses Proton—it won't start. Pressing the "play" button just syncs to the cloud and returns to the "play" button like nothing happened. If I attempt to launch a game using the desktop shortcut, a little popup shows for a few seconds and then disappears. The games don't show in the system monitor at all when I try to run them. I've been searching for a solution but haven't found anyone with a similar issue. I'm really frustrated and might have to switch back to Windows if I can't get even basic games like Terraria to work on this setup!
5 Answers
I had issues when I switched to Bazzite with my SSDs still in NTFS format. Double-check how your drives are formatted—could be a similar issue.
Make sure you've set the game to run in compatibility mode. Right-click on the game, go to compatibility, and force it to use Proton. Sometimes it’s the simple fixes that help!
Exfat could be the problem here. It doesn't handle symlinks, which Proton needs to run properly. You might have better luck switching to a file system like ext4 or btrfs instead.
I was in a similar situation with my drives formatted as NTFS, and once I reformatted them to a Linux-native file system, everything worked perfectly. You might want to consider that.
Have you thought about installing Steam outside of Flatpak? Sometimes the sandboxing with Flatpak can cause conflicts. You might want to try running `sudo apt install steam-installer` after enabling the multiverse repository. If that doesn’t work, you can download the .deb from the Steam website directly.
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