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Title: Proton/Wine Games Locking Up
Caldathras 5 days ago
I recently took the plunge and upgraded the laptop I game on from Linux Mint 21.3 to 22.3 using the usual upgrade/update features (not a clean install). As an FYI, I use the graphics-driver PPA.

I have been experiencing a problem with Proton/Wine games that utilize my Nvidia dGPU. It's quite random but after anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes, the game screen locks up but the music keeps playing. I have to use Alt-Space to close/kill the game window.

From the log reports in Heroic and Lutris, Feral GameMode and gstreamer appear to be having trouble finding and/or loading support and library files. Disabling GameMode seemed to help delay the lock-up but it still happen eventually. As Steam does not load GameMode by default, I've concluded that GameMode cannot be the problem.

I've tested games set to run on my Intel iGPU and haven't experienced the lock-ups in those game sessions. Oddly, the Native Linux games utilizing the Nvidia dGPU do not appear to be affected either. All games ran perfectly fine in Mint 21.3.

I am thinking that the problem is likely the Nvidia driver and that I should purge the current Nvidia driver from the system, reboot and reinstall the driver using Device Manager.

Am I on the right path or is there something I might be missing?
Caldathras 3 hours ago
Well, purging and reinstalling the Nvidia drivers seems to have helped with at least 50% of my test games. The purge knocked out Mint's Nvidia Prime Applet so I had to reinstall that as well.

The Ardenfall Demo and The First Templar have stopped locking up. Haven't checked Mordheim yet. Styx: Shards of Darkness still locks up before it reaches the main menu (but it could have been corrupted before the Mint upgrade -- I didn't check).

The frustrating one is Divinity 2: Developer's Edition. I know it was working fine before the Mint upgrade but it still randomly locks up the video after reinstalling the drivers. The sound and game continue on behind the frozen video. Gstreamer and GameMode continue to throw errors in the log. Apparently, though, this kind of screen lockup happens randomly in Windows as well. It could be the game, I suppose.

I do clean installs on major version upgrades for my daily driver laptop. I guess I'll have to consider doing the same on my T580. Less hassle and frustration, even if I have to reserve more space for an extra filesystem partition...

Last edited by Caldathras on 9 Mar 2026 at 5:07 pm UTC
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