Troubleshooting
This section is intended to document some common problems that users face when using SteamTinkerLaunch and shed some light on their cause, and any potential solutions.
Ensure that you have met all of SteamTinkerLaunch's hard dependencies. before installing. If you installed with a package manager, the packager should have taken care of installing all the relevant hard dependencies for you.
The most common missing our outdated dependency is Yad, particularly on Ubuntu-based distributions. Take care to ensure you have met all of SteamTinkerLaunch's relevant hard dependencies. If issues still persist, please open an issue.
The primary cause of this is a misconfigured locale. When SteamTinkerLaunch tries to show a game's name, if it has unicode characters in its name (such as "NieR:Automata™") it may be unable to on systems with a misconfigured locale. One of the most common instances of this locale issue is on Arch Linux with KDE Plasma. You can see if this is your problem by running steamtinkerlaunch from the command line and seeing if it gives you any warnings about your "locale being unsupported by the C library".
To fix your locale, run env | grep LC_ and examine the output. If any of these come back with an unusual or unfamiliar locale such as en_150 in their name, you'll want to overwrite this. If this does not return anything, you can run locale and take note of any locales that do not look set correctly. Commonly, this is LC_MEASUREMENT, but it may be different on your system and even LC_ALL may not be correctly configured.
You can follow the steps to configure your locale on your distribution, but you may still want/need to overwrite your locales. You can overwrite your misconfigured locale variables by taking note of the offending variable name(s), opening your shell profile and exporting them to your $LANG variable. For example, if your LC_MEASUREMENT variable is not set correctly, you can set it in your shell profile with export LC_MEASUREMENT="$LANG". You could also set this to a specific locale, withexport LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8", assuming you have this locale set up on your system!
This issue could also be caused because you've pressed the "Cancel" button several times to skip the wait requester. From the command line and with your game open, you can run steamtinkerlaunch wr e to re-enable the Wait Requester for your game.
Same issue as above.
Many distributions either do not have Yad installed or have a very outdated version. It is available via package manager for several distributions, but if you are still having difficulties it is possible to install Yad via an AppImage with steamtinkerlaunch yad ai. You can either provide the path to your own AppImage for Yad, or by default SteamTinkerLaunch will fetch one.
For more information, see the SteamTinkerLaunch Yad wiki page as well as the SteamTinkerLaunch FAQ section on Yad.
This is commonly caused by an unresolved Proton version mismatch. Go to the Main Menu and re-select your Proton version. For example, there may be an unresolved GE-Proton or Proton Experimental version mismatch.
This can also be caused by trying to run Proton games using SteamTinkerLaunch as a Launch Option, which is incorrect. To resolve this, you should use SteamTinkerLaunch as a Compatibility Tool for Proton games.
Many users, particularly those on Steam Deck, will incorrectly attempt to install SteamTinkerLaunch Flatpak (i.e. installing through Discover). As noted on the Steam Deck wiki page Flatpak SteamTinkerLaunch is only for use with Flatpak Steam. If you are not using Flatpak Steam, you should not use Flatpak SteamTinkerLaunch and should install it following one of the steps on the Installation wiki page.
If you are using Flatpak Steam, and Flatpak SteamTinkerLaunch is still not working for you, please open an issue.
Make sure you have the program installed and that it is available on your PATH. You can check if a tool is on your path from terminal by running which <progam_name>. If you installed a tool as an AppImage or Flatpak, SteamTinkerLaunch may be unable to find it. SteamTinkerLaunch does not download tools for you, it only integrates with existing tools on your system.
If issues still persist, please open an issue.
There is a chance that the modding issues you're facing have already been documented on the Modding wiki page. Take a look at that page and see if you can resolve the issue.
SteamTinkerLaunch offers the ability to install and use ModOrganizer 2 and Vortex Mod Manager. However, it does not guarantee mod compatibility on Linux. It doesn't do any extra magic to get mods working, so if they don't work on Linux normally without SteamTinkerLaunch, it is very unlikely that they will work with SteamTinkerLaunch.
If you have a mod that does work on Linux with your mod tool and only does not work when you use SteamTinkerLaunch, feel free to open an issue. If you have resolved it, please document how and we can add it to the Modding wiki page.
The SteamOS Game Mode runs inside of the GameScope compositor. This does not have very good support for multiple windows at the same time. Issues related to windowing inside of GameScope are not SteamTinkerLaunch bugs. SteamTinkerLaunch is only responsible for launching the applications, if they look bad on any compositor it isn't something SteamTinkerLaunch can do anything about.
When an update for a Valve Proton version comes through on Steam, or when you remove/update a Proton version (including downloading a GE-Proton variation), SteamTinkerLaunch will only update its Proton list to reflect this when /dev/shm/steamtinkerlaunch is cleared. You can do this yourself from your file manager or commandline, or restart your PC. On Steam Deck, you can do a reboot to accomplish this.
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