2w ago

Bazzite: Steam won't launch games from ext4 secondary drive

I finally took the time to move my gaming rig to Bazzite because I don't boot it that often, and because I don't want to spend half the little time I have for gaming doing updates and maintenance.

Most of my games are on an ext4-formatted secondary drive. Note: They worked perfectly on Manjaro and Nobara, the previous distros I used on this machine.

They are recognized by Steam, I can install and uninstall games just fine, it's just that... they don't launch. At all. Native or Proton. Like if I was on an exFAT partition. The "Launching" button switches back to "Play" almost instantly. If I move a game to my main home partition, it launches fine.

Has anyone encountered this issue before?

Where/how could I get detailed logs to try and pinpoint the issue?

Thanks!

Edit: Solved! The issue was with fstab configuration, always specify exec AFTER users, despite the doc telling you that order doesn't matter ;)

Wrong fstab entry :

UUID=blah-blah-blah /my/mount/point ext4 defaults,noatime,nofail,auto,exec,users,rw 0 2

Proper fstab entry (it's subtle):

UUID=blah-blah-blah /my/mount/point ext4 defaults,noatime,nofail,auto,users,exec,rw 0 2

15 comments

Another person already linked to how to get proton to spit out logs, but you can also start steam from a terminal, which then lets you see what error messages steam itself might be spitting out when you try to run a game.
Just close steam, open a terminal window, and type in "steam".
- Last time I checked, Proton logs included things that did not appear in normal terminal output, so you might want to do both. (That was years ago, though; things might have changed since then.)
  
  Absolutely, these are two entirely different logs.
- Good call. I'm seeing some stuff I don't like, I'll investigate tomorrow.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Proton-FAQ#how-to-enable-proton-logs
- The games crash long before launching proton. I suspect something is fishy in the runtime or even before that.

Have you changed the steam setting that is should use proton for all games? You can find it under the compatibility in your settings, just choose proton experimental, that should work for most games.

I assume your drive in fstab (or systemd mount, whatever your setup is using) has the 'defaults' permission option? If it doesn't that may be why games aren't launching. Also exFAT doesn't have the proper Unix permissions to launch games iirc.
- The issue was indeed from the fstab. But it was because exec was specified before users.
  
  Late to reply, but you should just leave it as defaults,noatime,nofail. From the mount man page, defaults already implies rw,suid,dev,exec,auto,nouser,async.
  EDIT: change it to rw,suid,dev,nouser,exec,auto,async,noatime,nofail actually, anything after defaults overrides the options specified by that.

I’ve seen an unusual number of posts recently from people on Fedora having issues with the rpmfusion version of Steam. Maybe something is broken with it.

That's weird with a beard. I've run games off a secondary drive in Bazzite with both ext4 and btrfs. Hope you figure it out.
- Worst case scenario, I have to nuke this drive and start over. I'll keep digging tho.
  
  Wow that IS subtle. Nice job figuring that out.
  I'm used to using fstab too but in my new box build, I finally went through the exercise of figuring out how to mount via systemd for the first time. Seems to work fine and is slightly less arcane. Slightly.

15 comments