I play WoW on a private server via Steam and Proton. It’s worked perfectly so far. I haven’t played for about two weeks, and suddenly WoW isn’t working via Steam anymore. It won’t even start. On some compatibility modes, particularly older ones, the game does at least launch, but all i get is a black screen. Not even the intro sequence starts.
Here’s what I’ve already tried:
- Downloaded WoW again and set it up on Steam
- Tried all the compatibility modes available on Steam
- Tried to get WoW to run via Lutris/Wine – again, using all available compatibility modes
- Updated Kubuntu to the latest version
- Tested different graphics drivers
Unfortunately, none of this works. What also puzzles me is that some games (Diablo 3, Warcraft 3) no longer work properly either; with these, I either get stuck at a frozen start screen or (in the case of Warcraft 3) they only run at around 20 FPS.
Other games, such as CS2, on the other hand, work absolutely fine, with high graphics settings and ~250 FPS.
It almost seems as though the other games are somehow being run via the onboard graphics card. That would at least be my attempt to explain why significantly older games like Warcraft 3 run at only 20 FPS, whilst modern games like CS2 have significantly better performance.
I also have a dual-boot system, so I’ve got Windows installed as well. And on Windows, all these games run smoothly with high FPS. I’d therefore tend to rule out a hardware issue.
So, I don’t use Lutris, so I can’t help much there, just Steam — sorry. I don’t know how it detects whether mangohud is present. There, it isn’t a checkbox, but a text field where one can specify options to be passed to the program run.
I don’t have Steam on the machine I’m on right now, so I can’t take a screenshot of that, unfortunately. I believe that that field is in the same place on Windows and Linux, though — not something Linux-specific.
searches
Here’s Steam’s help for setting the text:
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/7D01-D2DD-D75E-2955
That being said, rather than trying to first run the game under Steam or Lutris, I’d try to run
vkgearsandglxgearsfrom a virtual terminal program, whatever KDE uses — like, there’ll be some KDE terminal app. searches Looks like it’s called “Konsole”. That’ll cut out Lutris and Steam from the equation. If you can’t run 32-bit or 64-bit OpenGL or Vulkan stuff with hardware acceleration, then that’s a good candidate for being the cause. But if you can, then no sense in digging further down that path. Like, I’d just run, in Konsole:All of those should show a window with spinning gears, and none of them should say “llvmpipe”. If they have “llvmpipe”, that path is using software rendering, very probably because you lack 3D drivers for that path.
Uh…and just to clarify, so, Windows has a 3D API called DirectX. Linux doesn’t natively have this. Most Windows games are written to use DirectX. So when WINE or Proton (Proton being Steam’s version of WINE) run, they map DirectX calls to OpenGL or Vulkan, which are native to Linux. IIRC, different versions of DirectX have emulation targeting either OpenGL or Vulkan.
I think that Kubuntu has the same packages as regular Ubuntu, if I understand aright how that works — it’s a flavor of Ubuntu rather than a distro derived from Ubuntu.
So, assuming that to be the case, this should be a list of Kubuntu packages.
https://packages.ubuntu.com/
I don’t see lib32-amdgpu. Hmm.
looks further
Oh, I’m sorry. I was running a newer version of AMD’s drivers than what they ship with the distro on that system. I’m afraid I misinformed you. Apologies. There is no lib32-amdgpu — they renamed it to that in a newer version of the drivers, I guess.
checks on another system
Here’s a vanilla Debian trixie system. And…yeah.
I believe that those will pull in both 32-bit and 64-bit 3D drivers for OpenGL, if you’re using an AMD GPU. Those are in Ubuntu (Ubuntu Resolute, version 26.04).
https://packages.ubuntu.com/resolute/libdrm-amdgpu1
And for Vulkan…
And they’re present in Ubuntu Resolute as well:
https://packages.ubuntu.com/resolute/mesa-vulkan-drivers
That’s mesa-vulkan-drivers package isn’t specific to AMD GPUs, but it looks like it should pull them in.
If you’re using an NVidia GPU, I’m afraid that I don’t have a system handy to check on.
I also don’t use KDE, sorry, so I can’t add much there.
It’s possible that KDE has some sort of keychain manager that it stores your Wi-Fi passwords in, in which case it probably encrypts the passwords using your keychain password. I think that they call their keychain manager KWallet. If you’re not online, that’d explain your browser not working.
searches
This is ten years old, so the KDE UI might have changed, but:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/284770/how-to-disable-kde-wallet-and-have-remember-password-working
https://discuss.kde.org/t/kwallet-blocking-wi-fi-setup-is-pushing-new-users-away-from-kde-plasma/41854
That’s recent, so it sounds like, at least on some systems, it defaults to using the KDE keychain manager to encrypt the passwords.
Yeah, same problem — I’m afraid that I don’t use KDE, so I can’t provide much help there.
If nobody answers here, you might also try [email protected] on the WiFi thing and maybe the KDE package installation thing, since it’s not really a gaming question.
Wow, thank you so much for the comprehensive reply and the detailed help.
I’ve tried a few more things, but I’m afraid I’ll have no choice but to reinstall Kubuntu. At some point.
Something is definitely not right. Today, Steam suddenly wouldn’t start at all. Even though the last thing I did yesterday was play CS. I turned on my PC today and Steam isn’t working anymore. Not at all. No error message or anything…
I must admit that I’m losing some of my enthusiasm for Linux. After over 30 years of Windows, I was actually glad that I finally plucked up the courage to try Linux at the start of the year. After all, there are more and more reasons to avoid Windows these days. But if, every time I restart Linux, I have to worry that some programme will suddenly stop working, it’s really demotivating.
You can run the Steam client from a terminal like Konsole, and it’ll print a bunch of information about what it’s doing.
Can also have it write that information to a logfile, like:
Thanks for the suggestion. That’s what the console displays when I try to launch Steam. Do you have any idea what that means? :)
markus@markus-PC-Kubuntu:~$ steam Testing for explicit PulseAudio choice... ...and PulseAudio has been explicitly chosen, so using it. INFO: filtering /home/markus/.local/share/flatpak/exports/share out of XDG_DATA_DIRS because it is unreachable INFO: filtering /var/lib/flatpak/exports/share out of XDG_DATA_DIRS because it is unreachable INFO: filtering /usr/share/kubuntu-default-settings/kf5-settings out of XDG_CONFIG_DIRS because it is unreachable steam-runtime-launcher-service: no process found markus@markus-PC-Kubuntu:~$ Found NVIDIA version: 595.71.05 Need NVIDIA 32-bit: TrueEdit: Just as I’d finished typing this, the console command installed something after about 3–4 minutes. I couldn’t really tell what it was. But then Steam and also CS finally launched. :D I was kind of hoping that it might have fixed WoW ‘by itself’ as well, but unfortunately not.
Nothing there looks clearly broken to me. XDG_DATA_DIRS pointing at a directory that doesn’t exist shouldn’t hurt anything. Note that Steam does update itself occasionally when it starts, and I don’t recall what that looks like, so it’s not impossible that it was updating itself.
Sorry to bring this up again, but I’d really like to get it working again.
I noticed today that the CPU usage jumps to ~98% as soon as I start WoW. Even just in the main menu. I had previously started CS as a test to see how it behaves there. In CS, the CPU load stays around 25% even when playing against bots (so not just in the main menu) and with significantly higher graphics settings. So it seems there might be some kind of problem with the CPU?! That said, I’m even less sure how to influence the CPU’s performance and why it suddenly seems to be reaching its limits when running much older games.
I’ve attached a graph showing the CPU usage over time, including the values when launching CS, while on the desktop, and when launching WOW.
It’s probably not anything physically wrong with the CPU. It just means that the WoW binary is trying to do something in a loop and not getting anywhere (at least not quickly). It’s consistent with falling back to software rendering, which is what I guessed the problem might be, but other things could also cause that.
For Counterstrike, assuming that that’s what you mean by “CS”, I’d guess that the game’s engine probably uses about four threads, and it looks like you have 16 cores.
If you haven’t done the vkgears/glxgears stuff that I mentioned above to make sure that you can render using hardware acceleration using Vulkan and OpenGL, I’d do that. Given that you’ve said that you also get slow rendering performance with some other games, I’d be suspicious that that’s your problem, since that’s the behavior I’d expect to show up if you were falling back to software rendering — very slow rendering performance.
pokes around
It sounds like World of Warcraft switched to a 64-bit binary some time back, so probably no need to check that hardware rendering works for 32-bit binaries — just 64-bit, both Vulkan and OpenGL.
If you’ve already done the vkgears and glxgears stuff that I mentioned above and those work using hardware rendering without issues, then the underlying Linux 3D rendering stuff should be okay. That means that whatever’s at issue is probably in Proton or World of Warcraft. If you’re wanting to troubleshoot further, I’d probably try launching Steam from a virtual terminal (like, probably Konsole in your case) and then launching WoW and seeing if WoW prints anything there.
If nothing comes up there and you just get a black screen…well, let’s see. All of the important state should be on the WoW servers, so you could try uninstalling it and reinstalling WoW and see if that resolves whatever’s the issue. Take some time to download the game, but it’s not human time, so…shrugs it’d probably be the next thing I’d try.
But I wouldn’t recommend doing any of that until I’d done the vkgears/glxgears test I mentioned and confirmed that you’re rendering using your 3D hardware.
Oh, sorry, I’d completely forgotten to test that. As I said, I’m still new to Linux, but I hope I ran the vkgears test correctly?
The switch between 60 FPS and 144 FPS is probably because I dragged the programme from my second screen (max 60 Hz) over to my main screen, which runs at 144 Hz.
Unfortunately, I can’t make head nor tail of these figures. Does that help you at all?