Curious to hear what others have experienced. My current Sway system is being put through its paces, right now as a guinea pig for running Steam games through Wayland (and NOT through xwayland).
Add “PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 %command%” to game startup
My goal is to find a fix for the wine client error:???: write: Bad file descriptor error that I’ve had to deal with on a couple of games (has happened with every version of Proton I’ve tried from v8 to Hotfix). So far, after 3 days of gaming, I’ve only hit this once (with Grim Dawn); under X11/xwayland I would hit this every 1-2 hours at a minimum. Other than that, it’s been a very smooth ride; games performances are noticeably cleaner, although I’m not seeing any variations in FPS.
One other minor problem: when moving to another window/workspace, under X11/xwayland the game would basically freeze, freeing up GPU resources and stopping the fans from spinning. This is not working under Wayland, with any game I’ve tried.
I’ve now added export PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 to my .bashrc, so I’ll see how that goes.
Generally speaking though, it just works, but perhaps I’m not scrutinising log output and such to the degree you may have been. The three systems of mine running Steam are all using KDE Plasma under Wayland.
Perhaps play with your game’s full-screen settings. I noticed that when I had windowed fullscreen active, the game would not minimize. It would continue to run, but game performance visibly suffered while it didn’t have focus.
When I disabled windowed fullscreen so it was just typical fullscreen, when the game lost focus, it minimized, perhaps releasing resources?
FWIW, I removed the settings for enabling pure Wayland on Steam for now. I started getting the aforementioned errors again, so I’m back to square-one. Next step will be to try other versions of Proton, but I’m not sure how far to go back. My go-to game (Grim Dawn) came out in 2016, 3 years before Valve’s first Proton release.
I’ve been playing on wayland and on steam for a couple years now on AMD gpu’s (6700xt, 6950xt and now 9070xt) and have had nothing but great experiences so far.
Which version of Proton are you using? I’ve had the best luck with Proton-GE, but I’ve also tried Experimental, Hotfix, 9, and 8. I only get the bad descriptor error in Grim Dawn, for whatever that’s worth. Going back 20+ years to Worms Armageddon and the new Titan Quest 2, I’ve never had that particular error.
I use Proton-GE as my default as it works in most instances. When needed though, on a per-game basis, I’d tune, dropping back to an earlier version of Proton if necessary. Sometimes that may mean testing all the way back to Proton 6 for that particular game.
Don’ forget to check out ProtonDB for community tips for games that a giving you any grief. https://www.protondb.com/
I’m using Steam/Wayland with an Intel B580…No problems…generally only play full-screen. Running export PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 in the .bashrc....using current Gnome. All my games are running with Proton-GE.
Do your FS games freeze - I mean pausing, like it’s at FPS 0 - when they’re unfocused? It’s really the only thing stopping me from running pure Wayland with Steam. As @Bink suggested, I ran a couple of games as true Full-Screen (not Windowed Full-Screen), but they all kept running when I switched windows. In my current situation, this is an absolute must.
I have been gaming on Linux whole time after ditching Windows and never have had issues with Wayland/Steam combo. I can confirm this on Arch and Debian based ones.
I really appreciate all the feedback - thanks a bunch! The bad descriptor error is almost impossible to pinpoint what the actual cause is, although I think I’ve narrowed it down to switching areas (via teleport or scene change). I’ve gone as long as 3 days between hiccups, and as short as 15 minutes.
I want to go back to testing pure Wayland (slightly better performance and stability); getting closer to a suitable workaround for games still running 100% when backgrounded.
UPDATE: this does work with native Linux games, some might need to add SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland to the launch commands. I tested this with Baldur’s Gate 3, after I figured out that it now has a Linux-native version that works on PC.
An update from the “How did I not notice?” department…
Since my main gaming passion is Grim Dawn, this is the game that I’ve been fighting with for over 2 years. It seems that the Steam client has a bug - what a shock, right? - that was causing GD to run in 32-bit mode unless I actually launched it from the Steam library window; this was affecting .desktop and tray icon startups. After finding a command-line switch to force 64-bit mode, every aforementioned bug that I experienced disappeared. The launcher has a toggle to start automatically with the 64-bit client, not sure why it was being ignored.
For now, the only games that I can’t run pure Wayland on are:
Worms Armageddon (figures, since it’s 20+ years old)
Titan Quest II (not a Wayland issues, but a Linux/Proton one; runs great on Windows)
