Hey all, I just finished installing Fedora 41 and wanted to dive into gaming. I grabbed five games rated Platinum on ProtonDB, but only two actually launch. The other three show the launch process for a few seconds, then just bounce back to the Play button with no error. I’ve got “Enable Steam Play for all titles” turned on and have tried different Proton versions using ProtonUp-Qt, but no luck. Do I need some extra software or driver tweaks to get these other games running? For context, the working games are Cassette Beasts and Monster Sanctuary, while Nexomon, Nexomon Extinction, and Khazan The First Berserker won’t start. My setup has a Radeon RX 7800XT with default drivers installed via the software manager, no manual driver installs so far.
4 Answers
Since you’re relying on the default drivers for your Radeon RX 7800XT, it might be worth verifying if the Mesa drivers installed are fully up to date and support your card well. Sometimes the software manager installs a stable but older driver stack. Make sure you have the latest Mesa and Vulkan drivers, and also check if related firmware packages are installed. Proton depends on solid graphics drivers and sometimes updating them or adding 32-bit Mesa libs can make a big difference.
First off, make sure Vulkan is set up correctly because Proton relies on it heavily. You can run “vulkaninfo” in your terminal to check if Vulkan is working properly. Also, double-check that your filesystem isn’t something like NTFS; native Linux filesystems like ext4 or btrfs work best with Steam and Proton. And don’t forget to install the 32-bit (x86) libraries since some games depend on them even on 64-bit systems.
Just to confirm, you’ve got Steam Play enabled for all your games, right? Sometimes that setting can be off for specific titles, causing them not to launch. Double-check Steam’s settings to make sure Proton is being used universally.
If you’re open to trying other distros, I’ve found openSUSE Tumbleweed to be really solid for gaming. I had a couple of games that stubbornly refused to work on other distros like Mint, but on Tumbleweed with Steam Play enabled it just worked straight out of the box. The rolling release nature means you get newer kernels and drivers faster than on Fedora or Ubuntu which might give you better hardware support for your RX 7800XT.
