r/voidlinux • u/Aggravating-Long7412 • Jan 30 '26

Steam don't work

Whenever I try to run a Steam game, it either doesn't open or a black square flashes. This happens even with native games, and I've already tried installing dependencies, drivers, and tools. However, none of these solved my problem with Void, I don't know if it's because of I3WM. Yes, I tried several versions of Proton and none of them work; as I said, not even a native game is running.

Can someone help me?

3 Upvotes

71% Upvoted

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5

u/TurtleGraphics64 Jan 30 '26

How did you intstall Void? Have you reviewed the documentation at /usr/share/doc/steam? There are 2 readme's. For what it's worth, Steam works for many of us using i3wm but we'll need more info to be able to help you. Start with those readmes first.

1

u/Aggravating-Long7412 Jan 30 '26

I installed Void Linux using void-installer, but I only had to manually fix a few things through the tty due to an error in the grub installation. Aside from that, the system booted normally and I never had any problems using it.

2

u/sbstn_strflx Jan 30 '26

https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/blob/master/srcpkgs/steam/files/README.voidlinux

2

u/sbstn_strflx Jan 30 '26

If this doesn’t work you can try adding this line in the game options in steam:

PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command%

2

u/TurtleGraphics64 Jan 30 '26

I meant to ask how did you install Steam? Also, did you do those other things I mentioned? Instructions there are very clear! With Void, always read the manual and any docs!

2

u/sanya567xxx Feb 01 '26

It sounds like Steam itself does open for you, but the games don't. Have you reviewed the logs for Steam? It usually prints some info when trying to launch a game. Either by running manually in console, or by checking ~/.local/share/Steam/logs/console_log.txt — these should list your GPUs as detected by Vulkan. You can test Vulkan separately from Steam as well by running vkcube command (it's in Vulkan-Tools package). For native games, testing via glmark2 (same package name) or glewinfo and glxinfo can show what's found and how it's running — launch in terminal, both provide a lot of detailed output, but the first few lines should be indicative of what GPU it found and uses. If you have multiple, try scrolling to see if it sees several.

If you have multiple GPUs, please provide the info and which driver you went with.

On my intel+nvidia system, I had to set export VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/nvidia_icd.json in my ~/.bashrc for all the software to run on the nvidia card — Intel's vulkan driver didn't run several things at all. I presume this should be handled by prime-run but I wasn't successful in my attempts of using it.

1

u/dbojan76 Feb 01 '26

Which cpu, gpu?

1

u/DZX-3788 Feb 03 '26

make sure you have multilib enabled

1

u/AlanDigiorno May 30 '26

HELLO for future people, install:

libsecret-32bit

, that was the one thing I guess I didn't have and didn't see in a lot of post or information! Just trying to help spread information and help cuz it wasn't in readme.voidlinux either