I recently switched from Windows 11 to Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon and most of the desktop experience has been good, but gaming has been unreliable. I installed Steam and Proton, disabled Secure Boot so the NVIDIA driver would be recognized, and confirmed that my RTX 2060 is being used. However, games such as Deadlock and The Bazaar sometimes crash during normal play or when I alt-tab, open Discord, or take a screenshot. When this happens, the entire desktop becomes unresponsive: the mouse still moves, but the keyboard, terminal, and restart commands do nothing. I have to hold the physical power button to shut the laptop down. After one crash, Deadlock may also crash again during its loading screen until I reinstall it. This almost never happened on the same computer under Windows 11. The system is an Acer Nitro 5 with an Intel i7-9750H, GeForce RTX 2060, 16 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB SSD. Has anyone dealt with full system freezes like this on Mint, and what should I check first?
5 Answers
Before forcing the power off, try switching to a text console with Ctrl+Alt+F3 or using the Magic SysRq sequence if it is enabled. If either works, the kernel is still alive and you may be able to kill the game or restart the display manager cleanly. If even those fail, capture the previous boot's logs after restarting. A full lockup can also be caused by unstable RAM, overheating, GPU power issues, or a faulty driver, so running a memory test and monitoring temperatures would be worthwhile.
Try the games with the Cinnamon desktop effects and compositing disabled, especially if the freezes happen while alt-tabbing, taking screenshots, or opening another window. Testing from a different desktop session, such as KDE Plasma, can help determine whether Cinnamon is involved. It is also worth trying another Proton version and checking the game's compatibility reports for known launch options or workarounds.
This sounds more like a graphics driver, kernel, compositor, or hardware-level lockup than an ordinary game crash. Check the NVIDIA driver version and kernel logs after rebooting with commands such as `journalctl -b -1 -p err` and `journalctl -b -1 | grep -iE 'nvidia|gpu|oom|hang|error'`. Also check whether the system is running out of memory or overheating. Reinstalling the game usually will not fix a driver or desktop freeze.
Make sure you are using the recommended proprietary NVIDIA driver from Mint's Driver Manager rather than a mismatched package, and update the kernel and system packages. Turn off overlays and hardware acceleration in Discord and your browser for testing, since the game, desktop compositor, and those applications may all be using the GPU at the same time. Leave VSync and graphics settings alone initially; first change only one variable at a time so you can identify what actually stops the freezes.
Some games work well on Linux, but that does not guarantee every combination of Proton, NVIDIA driver, kernel, and desktop environment will be stable. Try a clean test with a different Proton release and no launch tweaks, then compare it with a native Linux title or a simple GPU benchmark. If native applications and benchmarks also freeze the computer, focus on the system rather than Steam. Keep backups, since repeated hard shutdowns can corrupt the filesystem even though they do not usually permanently damage the machine.
The problem is not limited to one game, so I would treat Deadlock as a useful test case rather than assume it is the only cause. If every game can lock the machine, the common factors are the driver, kernel, desktop session, power management, or hardware.