Steam troubles (no game output screen showing)

[droid_mike]

Dear fellow users,

I have been using various versions of Puppy Linux off and on for many years. I usually can figure out problems, but this time I am stumped! I decided to put fossapup on an older laptop so that I could run Steam game streaming from a new gaming computer I just built. After days of battling, I am happy to report that streaming seems to be working so far. Playing actual games, though, not so much. I launch the game after making sure that proton is enabled. It says it is running. It keeps saying that for a long time, but the game output screen is somewhere out in the ether as it is not showing up on my display. I don't know how to even begin to debug this or what to do. Any advice or help would be appreciated!

the only other hint that I can provide is that in "big screen" mode, the library screen, store screen and such just show black. That isn't a problem as I can use big picture mode or small screen mode OK, but maybe it is a clue. This is an intel GPU machine, but I'm testing not intense games (mostly 20 year old games that should work on an Intel GPU).

Whatever more information I can provide you, please let me know, and I'll get it. If you have any other advice, please let me know. Maybe I should try another distribution? Someone said VanillaDpup worked well for them with steam.

Thank you again! I look forward to your replies!

[bigpup]

I am also seeing this.

There is all kinds of how to fix, if you do a google search for the issue.

So far, nothing offered in those ways to fix, have worked for me.

Still looking and trying stuff.

[droid_mike]

Well, at least I'm not alone!

I think I may have had a breakthrough, yesterday, though. I first tried Vanilla dPup to see if that would help. I definitely liked that flavor. It seemed to run faster, was more polished, and uses the modesetting Intel driver by default. I like the fact that it uses Debian as that's what I['m familiar with in regards to installing stuff. It was much easier to install Steam on it, but the same problem still remained, although it did attempt to go into the graphics mode, it seemed.

Then fate intervened, I think. I ran out of space on the user save file. Fortunately, I had put it this time in an SD card instead of the boot USB. the SD card had a different format, and the software allowed me to expand the user save file to 20 GB. I didn't understand why it was taking so much space as I was saving the steam games in a different drive. Anyways, after reinstalling Steam and all its parts, it started to work, at least for some games. I cannot be sure, but I think expanding the save file did it. I know puppy doesn't use a normal swap file (don't make a separate one--I tried that and performance cratered), but I think it makes a flexible swap in the user save space. I'm guessing Steam may have needed more memory... Either that, or it was a total fluke, YMMV.

I don't know if that was the trick or if it would work in fossapup, but see if you can expand your user save file size to a big number, delete all the steam stuff and reinstall everything so as not to corrupt any files. Maybe that will work. Try launching the first time in big picture mode. The game that I tested was Battle Tanks, as it was free and compatible with proton. BTW, my library pages and such are still black, but big picture mode worked ok as well as small mode.... at least it did last night. I hope it still works today! Let us know if my suggestions worked for you.

[bigpup]

I have basically already tried what you suggest.

My save is a save folder, with lots of free space on the partition, to use by the save folder.

I have 32GB of RAM, so RAM is not the issue.

Seems by my Google search results.
This is a general issue with Steam, in any operating system.

If you have a swap file or a swap partition.
When Puppy boots, it should find and use it, when needed.
The default setting for swappiness, is usually when RAM usage gets to around 60%, free RAM.
That to me, is too soon to use swap. Not sure why, default was made that high, but it is.
I always make it, a lower free RAM point, by using this program:
Swapfile Manager
https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=6735
.
It has a change swappiness, where it can easily be changed, to whatever you want.

Swap access, starting too soon, could be why stuff seems to slow, when swap is used.

They seem to constantly be updating and working on the Steam software.
This has caused issues in the past, but nothing like this one.

[bigpup]

I am starting to wonder if Steam is trying to get people to use the big picture mode

If yes, a really bad way to do it.

I just tried Steam on a fresh clean install of Fossapup64 9.5 fully updated with Quickpet->Info->Fossapup updates.

Still the same as what you are seeing.

Note:
Do not try the ideas about try using the beta build of Steam.
That was a total mess.!

[droid_mike]

Well, I have some good news... I figured out how to get the "big screen mode" (not the big picture mode, but the default window) to show the libraries, store and news and such. These windows are rendered via Chromium, and Chromium doesn't like to run as root. If you type the command "run-as-spot steam" in a console window, those windows will work again, although, they will think you are a new user and ask you to download everything again.

The bad news is that my tinkering around has somehow made my working steam (albeit very slowly and inefficiently) stop working. Valve is certainly working hard to make steam games run well on linux, but only for newer processors. In my research, I found that the older Intel processors don't have vulcan, and the standard drivers in linux are rather limited. In short, if you want to play steam games in an older Intel machine (like a windows tablet), you are best to use it in Windows, where the drivers are optimized and no compatibility layers are needed. I'm going to be looking into a dual boot situation, where I use windows for steam games and linux for everything else. I do like Vanilla dPup, so I may stick with that. We'll see how it handles other emulators like retroarch and dosbox.

Supposedly manjaro linux works well with steam and older Intel processors. I will give that a try and see how it goes. Otherwise, I will probably do a dual boot. I'll let you guys know.

[bigpup]

Thanks for the info!

Google Chrome getting into everything

Some of the game running issues, are just the games, and what they need to run.

I have always found that the older or more simple games run well in Puppy Linux.

The really high featured, highly graphic, resource demanding ones, not so good.

You definitely need to be using the graphics hardware manufactures drivers.

[mikeslr]

...

The bad news is that my tinkering around has somehow made my working steam (albeit very slowly and inefficiently) stop working. ...
Supposedly manjaro linux works well with steam and older Intel processors. I will give that a try and see how it goes. Otherwise, I will probably do a dual boot. I'll let you guys know.

I know nothing about Steam. Just posting to suggest alternatives to your parting thought. A Frugal Puppy only needs it own Folder (and a boot-menu-entry). Puppys save customiztions, settings, and installed applications in a SaveFile or SaveFolder. If you create more than one, on boot-up you'll be asked which to use. So it's easy and efficient to setup and boot into two different versions of any Puppy.

And (IDK) if Steam is available as a portable or AppImage you can have two versions, each with different launch settings. Along the same lines, rather than installing Steam, you might be able to package it as an SFS. Make two with different desktop Exec= commands, and MAYBE, you can SFS-(un)Load one then SFS-Load the other without have to reboot.

Last Possibility: A chroot is actually an entire operating system with its own applications. It is linked to, and its applications can be run from, the 'Main' operating system. https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=3721.