which distro is it? there are many that were not made with gaming in mind
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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There's a program called amdgou_top you can use to see the breakdown of components on the GPU(s) and their utilization, as well as what apps are running on the GPU
OP, I didn't see if you'd confirmed that you'd enable Steam Play, see this article: https://support.system76.com/articles/linux-gaming
Kerbal Space Program has a Linux native client and a windows client. By default, Steam will try to install the Linux native client, which is using OpenGL and, apparently, doing software rendering.
You could try to troubleshoot why OpenGL is broken, you probably are missing an environmental variable or something to tell it to use a specific device and so it defaults to software. However, this is kind of a moot point. Development stopped on OpenGL in 2017 and so bugs and weirdness will continue to crop up and fixing it won't resolve your core issue (Which may be that you're just not using Proton).
If you're going to game on this system then you should do what most people do and enable Steam Play and let Steam download the Windows version of KSP and run it through Proton (aka Steam's version of WINE). Often the Windows versions of games are more supported than the Linux native versions and WINE/Proton do an excellent job of translating the underlying windows system calls into Linux-ese. Proton is the primary reason why gaming on Linux works, because it lets you just play the Windows version of games.
Your logs indicate that your graphics card is the default device for Vulkan and so it should just work as soon as you enable Steam Play. If you have any problems with other games (once you verify that you're using your graphics card) you can look them up on Protondb (https://www.protondb.com/) and see if you need to make any setting changes. KSP looks to have a Gold rating and appears to work with Proton without any changes.
So steam play was already enabled, it looks like it defaults to "steam Linux runtime 1.0 (scout). When I select different versions of proton runtime I get different behavior dependig on which one I select.
Proton 9 says that it cannot switch to my monitors resolution,
Proton experimental and hot fix launch the game (I can hear it!), but things are ... Weird. It only renders the windows behind it and the custom game cursor. When I alt enter to bring it into Windows mode, it's still just the windows/desktop that would be behind the game but now it's scaled differently.
EDIT:
It's hard to tell but the above screenshot is the game window
Stay with experimental for now.
Do other games show a similar behavior or is it limited to KSP?
BG3 should work fine (was just playing it on Linux about 30m ago, but Arch, btw, etc).
You can get some extra logging from steam, if you exit completely and the, in a terminal, run:
steam -d
It'll start Steam but output a lot of info to the terminal. The bit we're interested in isn't the stuff that it generates while Steam is starting. We want the bit that happens when you press play on a game. It'll output the information about the important bits (like the Vulkan device, driver versions, monitors, etc )
Make sure there's no obvious account info in the logs (there shouldn't be, but always check) and post that.
I'm off to bed but I'll check in with you tomorrow
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