So, I went to go play WoW today, the first time since the patch was done, and I can’t.
I am running an Ubuntu Linux system, using Steam, and running it with Proton-GE version 10-25. This has worked before (2 days ago), but now whenever I start the game it closes immediately.
I have tried refreshing/reinstalling the Battle.net client, and did a scan of my WoW files with no problems detected. I tried removing my cache with nothing working. I tried other versions of Proton (including Experimental and Hotfix), but they all result in the same thing.
Has anyone else encountered something like this?
I don’t think it is directly with the main WoW client, as I have noticed that WoW Classic also won’t open.
Was there a recent Battle.net client released or something?
Linux is an unsupported OS, so don’t expect a ton of help here, but it does sound possible that maybe they changed something and that wouldn’t surprise me. Bot farms use Linux a lot to virtualize the clients and evade some of the anticheat related stuff. It might have been some move to break that.
It could also be that something changed on the rendering side of things and maybe it’s not playing well with your OS, drivers or DXVK/VKD3D/Proton compatibility layer stuff.
I know it isn’t supported. But, I’ve used Linux for WoW since the closed Vanilla Beta back in 2003. And I have gotten help from other Linux users before. There’s actually quite a number of us.
I currently am continuing down a path which could explain it. Apparently there was an Nvidia driver update, and it is doing something strange. So I am working on that.
Maybe try rolling back? You’ll need to make sure to correctly delete/uninstall the drivers first, then completely reinstall the version you want. If you don’t do it like this, then vestigial files or settings might clash.
Yeah, usually. I just know I’ve had some woes with Linux and drivers, while doing machine learning related work, so I prefer to play it safe and make sure I’ve completely removed them beforehand.
Yeah, something happened, and I am trying to figure it out. I’ve been using liquorix kernels, and a new version came out 3 days ago, which seems to have something to do with it. I’m using the default kernel and games are all crapping out - this isn’t just a WoW thing, so thankfully there’s that. I just need to figure out what is going on and then I can get things back to running. I’m guessing its an unattended upgrade or something.
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Good news Everyone, I fixed the problem.
Apparently, when the Liquorix kernel updated automatically 3 days ago, it was incompatable with Nvidia drivers. So my system decided to downgrade the nvidia drivers until it found a compatable version, which didn’t exist. So rather than the 570 driver I was using, I was at 470. Which is bad and breaks all the Vulcan graphics stuff.
So the solution was:
Reboot into a safe mode for the generic kernel.
Remove all Liquorix kernel stuff
Reinstall all generic kernel stuff to be safe.
Installed the lowlatency HWE kernel, which was pretty close to the benefits I had with Liquorix, but without the added bonus of breaking my nvidia drivers.
Uninstalled ALL nvidia drivers completely.
Installed the nvidia 570 driver.
Locked the nvidia driver from being able to be updated/changed to a different version.
so this fix for me tonight after hours of trouble shooting is a steam launch command that forces wine d3d instead of vulkan which in game seems to force dx11. Performance is much poorer and the game stutters but turning settings down helps keep it playable. Without this launch command battlenet.exe will not function.
PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command%
I found a different command that will allow the launcher to start without carrying over a performance loss into the game :