Fedora 43 (KDE Plasma): games fail to launch as of today
Same exact issue here. After updating, games using proton do not launch anymore. I think i also saw an amdgpu update which could be the problem.
Computer Information:
Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
Model: Z790 UD
Form Factor: Desktop
No Touch Input Detected
Processor Information:
CPU Vendor: GenuineIntel
CPU Brand: 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-13600K
CPU Family: 0x6
CPU Model: 0xb7
CPU Stepping: 0x1
CPU Type: 0x0
Speed: 5200 MHz
20 logical processors
14 physical processors
Hyper-threading: Supported
FCMOV: Supported
SSE2: Supported
SSE3: Supported
SSSE3: Supported
SSE4a: Unsupported
SSE41: Supported
SSE42: Supported
AES: Supported
AVX: Supported
AVX2: Supported
AVX512F: Unsupported
AVX512PF: Unsupported
AVX512ER: Unsupported
AVX512CD: Unsupported
AVX512VNNI: Unsupported
SHA: Supported
CMPXCHG16B: Supported
LAHF/SAHF: Supported
PrefetchW: Unsupported
BMI1: Supported
BMI2: Supported
F16C: Supported
FMA: Supported
Operating System:
"Fedora Linux 43 (KDE Plasma Desktop Edition)" (64 bit)
Kernel Name: Linux
Kernel Version: 6.17.8-300.fc43.x86_64
X Server Vendor: The X.Org Foundation
X Server Release: 12401009
X Window Manager: KWin
Steam Runtime Version: steam-runtime_1.0.20250929.168578
Client Information:
Version: 1763795278
Browser GPU Acceleration Status: Enabled
Browser Canvas: Enabled
Browser Canvas out-of-process rasterization: Enabled
Browser Direct Rendering Display Compositor: Disabled
Browser Compositing: Enabled
Browser Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
Browser OpenGL: Enabled
Browser Rasterization: Enabled
Browser Raw Draw: Disabled
Browser Skia Graphite: Disabled
Browser Video Decode: Enabled
Browser Video Encode: Disabled
Browser Vulkan: Disabled
Browser WebGL: Enabled
Browser WebGL2: Enabled
Browser WebGPU: Disabled
Browser WebNN: Disabled
Video Card:
Driver: AMD AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT (radeonsi, navi31, LLVM 21.1.5, DRM 3.64, 6.17.8-300.fc43.x86_64)
Driver Version: 4.6 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 25.2.7
Desktop Color Depth: 24 bits per pixel
Monitor Refresh Rate: 143 Hz
VendorID: 0x1002
DeviceID: 0x744c
Revision Not Detected
Number of Monitors: 2
Number of Logical Video Cards: 1
Primary Display Resolution: 2560 x 1440
Desktop Resolution: 5120 x 1440
Primary Display Size: 27.48" x 15.47" (31.54" diag), 69.8cm x 39.3cm (80.1cm diag)
Primary VRAM: 20480 MB
Sound card:
Audio device: Realtek ALC897
Memory:
RAM: 31912 Mb
VR Hardware:
VR Headset: None detected
No VR configuration with trackers detected
Most number of trackers in a session: 0
Miscellaneous:
UI Language: English
LANG: en_GB.UTF-8
Total Hard Disk Space Available: 865642 MB
Largest Free Hard Disk Block: 568441 MB
Storage:
Number of SSDs: 6
SSD sizes: 1000G,1000G,1000G,1000G,500G,0B
Number of HDDs: 0
Number of removable drives: 0
There's a post on the Fedora discissions done a few minutes ago, mentioning to downgrade mesa: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/mesa-25-2-7-appears-to-break-proton-games/173341 sudo dnf downgrade ‘mesa*’ which worked fine for me.
Not sure what they've done in their packaging from 25.2.4 -> 25.2.7 which went wrong (access to https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/mesa currently experiences problems it seems). I also found some comments on the package bump: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2025-82b66363b4 mentioning the issue and giving downvotes three days ago but the update got pushed out anyways..
Hello @kfuetscher, as you've noted, this is a regression in Fedora's packaging of the mesa driver and that's where this needs to be resolved.
Trying to login on https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2025-82b66363b4 to give feedback like they state on their site below "Please log in to add feedback." sadly results in a Internal Server Error message, at least for me. I hope someone else is able to do this any maybe mention the report here for them to notice that the issue is quite present.
Downgrading Mesa resolves the issue and I'm able to launch all games again.
sudo dnf downgrade mesa*
Starting Deadlock, I get a similar problem. Looking at the system monitor, it seems stuck running explorer.exe? Constant 6% total CPU usage, actually hogging one core at 100%.
Edit: After downgrading Mesa and manually killing that explorer process, the game runs. Canceling the game start from steam did not kill the offending process automatically.
This is also happening on my nvidia system, so this is not just an AMD GPU issue.
This also broke games that do not use the Proton translation layer, like Factorio. The only game I tested that wasn't broken was Minecraft.
I attached a debugger and it appears to be getting stuck specifically in steamoverlayvulkanrenderer.so's implementation of vkInstanceGetProcAddr; games using OpenGL are not affected. You can verify this with FEZ using the public SDL3 branch; launch will hang unless you pass /gldevice:OpenGL as a launch option.
EDIT: One more detail: If testing FEZ on desktop, be sure to set SDL_VIDEO_DRIVER=x11 as well, as the default will continue to run normally - coincidentally the bug from #8020 cancels out this one, so Vulkan on desktop will run fine when using Wayland.
Running FEZ outside of Steam with Xwayland also works without issue.
The regression appears to be triggered by a backported merge request (not yet reviewed/applied to mainline) for Mesa's device select layer, so this will affect all drivers, not just AMD's. Why this only affects the overlay layer and not any other Vulkan application or layer is unknown; Valve may want to investigate even though the layer's behavior is what changed in this instance.
The blunt and probably bad workaround for now is to add NODEVICE_SELECT=1 to your .bashrc and restart. You probably should not do this, especially if you have more than one GPU on your system.
Downgrading Mesa resolves the issue and I'm able to launch all games again.
sudo dnf downgrade mesa*
For F43 users who haven't upgraded to mesa 25.2.7 (or after downgrading), you can exclude it:
sudo dnf versionlock exclude mesa-filesystem-25.2.7-2.fc43
This blocks only the specific nvr (name-version-release). dnf will say it's skipping some packages during transactions. Future versions will not be blocked.
To keep track of future updates and provide feedback:
https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/?search=&packages=mesa&releases=F43
Fixed in 25.2.7-3 according to testers. The update is already in stable, just upgrade normally (not using --advisory=...)
I can confirm the update to 25.2.7-3.fc43 (https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/mesa/c/137bad49103a778e54802037dab9e9315e38265d?branch=f43 / https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2025-2f4ba7cd17) fixed the issue for me and this bug can be closed if there's no further ado like you may want to keep it open to address what @flibitijibibo wrote in regards to:
Why this only affects the overlay layer and not any other Vulkan application or layer is unknown; Valve may want to investigate even though the layer's behavior is what changed in this instance.
Closing per the last couple comments.
Your system information
Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:
Starting from today Steam is unable to launch most of the games, while things worked fine yesterday. (There have been Fedora updates, but as the steam client is dated 22. Nov it looks like there have been updates as well making it harder to narrow down what's causing the problem / what happened.) Proton games don't work at all and hang with being started:
Native games like Halls of Torment appear to be running but don't show any game window at all:
The only exception is for example Project Zomboids which still works fine.
When manually launching for example the native game Halls of Torment from the game directory instead of from within Steam, it also works and starts up and runs fine:
I'm on Proton Exerimental, but switching to Proton 10 shows the exact same behaviour. There doesn't seem to be any output on the terminal, I hope the attached logs are of any use. Trying to get a Proton log with
PROTON_LOG=1 %command%didn't work and didn't generate any logfile in the first place, like things never get run at all and the problem happens even before running e.g. Proton.Steps for reproducing this issue: