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CS:GO intermittently crashes
WORM Aug 15, 2023
Not looking for support. Just venting. Also I ask that you take the time to read this whole post before replying.

I'm not sure when this started happening since I took a long break from this game. But it seems to me like the overhauled Steam UI is the culprit or is at least related.

Sometimes it crashes on launch. Bringing up the Steam overlay instantly crashes it most of the time. Finally sprinkle in occasional crashes for no particular reason.

Valve as a whole has done so much for Linux as a gaming platform. I am very grateful for their contributions making gaming on Linux more viable. But the Counter-Strike team has a terrible history of only testing the game on Windows, with an SSD, and Nvidia graphics cards. The Retakes game mode still only consistently works on Windows. It's baffling. I expect better from the same company that's selling handheld Linux gaming machines. Especially since we're talking about one of Valve's biggest titles. Does this set a good example for other developers?

I know that CS2 is on its way. But I have absolutely no reason to believe that the team is going to suddenly care about properly testing their game and supporting anything other than Windows + Nvidia. The limited test straight-up excluded Linux, which only reinforces my assessment of their priorities. At this point I'm pretty much expecting CS2 to be Windows-only at launch, with other platform support coming later.

Obviously Valve doesn't owe me or any other Linux gamer anything. But the fact that Valve just doesn't give a shit about how CS:GO- a game that conveniently doesn't make sense to play on the SteamDeck- runs in Linux is just scummy.

I don't blame Valve for not fixing this new crashing issue. But knowing they could only test more on Linux, I think there's a slim chance it might've been avoided in the first place.
dvd Sep 2, 2023
I think this problem might not be new, i had (admittedly very rare) CTDs on MMs with CS:GO as well.
WORM Sep 2, 2023
Quoting: dvdI think this problem might not be new, i had (admittedly very rare) CTDs on MMs with CS:GO as well.

As of right now, I can hardly get the game to launch normally. My friend discovered that launching from big picture mode solved that, and prevented a lot of the crashing. I've never needed to do this before. You're right, occasional crashes aren't new. But the more frequent crashes are.

It's not just me. I'm on Artix and my friend uses Ubuntu. I'm not sure if we could be using more different distros lol
Valso Sep 3, 2023
1. CSGO has always been glitchy and poorly optimized since the day of its release. I'm not a big fan of first person shooters (there are a few I like but they're single player only) but I still tried CSGO a few times and despite that back then AND now I cover the recommended requirements by a lot, the game would still fluctuate in frames per second, run poorly on the highest settings and display graphical artifacts. I think they rushed the release of this game and never really fixed it or simply don't care about fixing it.
2. The new Steam UI is full of bugs and Valve doesn't seem to care to fix them either. Since the most of the games I play on Steam are Windows games, there's vulkan shaders processing. But ever since the new design came out, I'm spending more time waiting for the damn shaders than playing a game. Update or no update for the game (WOT Blitz, mostly), every time I run the Steam client, it processes shaders which is getting annoying but I eventually found a workaround - I don't close the Steam client, so shaders are being processed only if the game updates.
Aside from the shaders processing, there are other bugs with the new design, like games not appearing on the screen at all, if you click the desktop icon created by Steam (but if you click the "launch" button in the client, they do start normally), not remembering settings for the mirror and tons of other issues I'm too lazy to list right now.
Ever since the new design came out, the reports are pouring like a rainstorm but Valve does nothing to fix even one of them.

This is for all Arch users who had the same problems like me:

So far the only thing that partially fixed some of the bugs was to reinstall Steam. But since this is linux and things are a lot different than Windows, you can't actually uninstall Steam bc the nvidia and other drivers depend on it (or is it vice versa?) and if you try to uninstall Steam, the package manager will cry about unsolved dependencies. Well, at least Pacman does, IDK if it's the same with other distros. So in Arch's case, you gotta "unhook" it from the dependencies using

 
sudo pacman -Rdd steam steam-native-runtime

delete ~/.steam (no need to delete SteamLibrary), reboot and then install these two packages back, then reboot again. Steam will not run, if you don't reboot after reinstalling these two packages. The majority of problems will remain, like the constant shaders processing but at least some of the minor annoying bugs will go away (like remembering the mirror problem), which is still something.
WORM Sep 19, 2023
I've had the same issue with processing shaders. CS:GO is one of the games too, and that's running in OpenGL! Pretty frequently the Steam client webview goes completely black. Scrollbars are drawn incorrectly, making them virtually unusable. I've probably had other issues with it but these are the ones I remember.

My anger was recently reignited when Luke on the WAN show read a comment that Valve apparently thinks there are only 10.000 people on the planet that are capable of working for them. I've long been aware that they only hire senior developers. I already found that to be completely ridiculous. But this new bit of information takes it even further. Maybe all 10,000 of those top developers refused to work at Valve, so they had to settle. I know that people assume Valve hires interns because of some of the mistakes they've made. But no, it's a team of "elite" developers. Give me a break.
WORM Sep 27, 2023
CS2 launched today. I'm a little surprised that they released the Linux build. Especially considering it's obvious that Valve hardly tested it (which is not a surprise at all). Here are the problems I've encountered in my mere minutes of gameplay:

  • No sound (fixed with -sdlaudiodriver pipewire launch option)

  • Doesn't launch on my primary display

  • Performance is looking to be bad, too early to say for sure. Update: yeah it plays like absolute shit on my 13700KF/7900 XTX

  • Strange blue and yellow aura around smokes (some folks are reporting smokes not rendering at all)

  • Actually a lot of particles are creating that kind of blue and yellow effect



Last edited by WORM on 28 September 2023 at 6:53 pm UTC
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