Kubuntu Linux, Steam and Proton, Wayland and Nvidia... more of a how-to ramble than a review

A few days before the official release of Kubuntu 24.10 I decided to do an install. While not an entirely sensible idea, there was method in my madness: I wanted access to the Nvidia 560 driver as it seemed it might play better with both my Steam games and with Wayland. In the past, I would do a Linux install, and all would be fine until I grabbed the Nvidia driver, at which point the login with Wayland would fail and I would need to go back to X11.

I am not here to get into a flame war - the bigger distros (supported by folk with far more understanding of the way the code works than I could ever dream about) are moving to Wayland. I have read that the code is more secure, cleaner and easier to maintain than X11 - If that is the case indeed then I can use that horrible phrase: a win-win situation (aaarrggh)

That said, I want to be able to game - and I also want a KDE Plasma interface with my own choice of applications - so Firefox browser, Thunderbird email, Libreoffice's Calc, Writer and Impress, Strawberry music player, VLC for watching videos, Krita for drawing and painting and finally Bluefish as my text editor (which I use, despite the Gnome libraries required, because HTML auto-completion in Kate seems non-functional - while with Bluefish it does work rather well.)

So I started by grabbing the iso of a Kubuntu 24.10 daily, picked up a USB drive (soooo happy CDs and DVDs are not required these days), opened Gparted (I was running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS at the time), made a new partition table for the USB drive (msdos in case you are wondering - I have an oldish PC), noted the device name for the USB drive as shown by Gparted and then ran the dd command (you will need to either be root or use sudo) thus:

NB: DO NOT JUST COPY AND PASTE THE TERMINAL COMMAND BELOW - ENSURE YOU HAVE THE CORRECT FILE NAME OF THE ISO AND THE CORRECT USB DEVICE NAME

dd bs=4M if=myFile.iso of=/dev/sdb conv=fdatasync status=progress

There IS an Ubuntu tool called Startup Disk Creator if you are in Ubuntu already, but I prefer the above. In Windows, I believe Rufus would be your goto to create the bootable USB drive.

Having booted off the freshly made Kubuntu 24.10 USB iso, we wait while the system detects hardware and pops up the option to try Kubuntu or to install it (getting to this point took a few minutes - nothing unusual here)

You get the option to set your language - first time I did this, I thought Kubuntu had crashed but it all came back to the same screen but with my chosen language in place. Having previously had a look around the system - making sure mouse, keyboard and sound work etc, I started the install - which was the usual simple options of your name, computer name, password, what time zone and similar - you do get to decide if you want the minimal install (basic system with GUI and you get to add your particular applications after the install), or the full install (which means you are good to go when install is completed and you get to use what the developers have chosen for you), or the third choice of the full install plus some extra applications like Krita which you would not need if you were not intending to draw or paint, obviously. You also choose what disk to use for your install and how to do this.

IF YOU ARE GOING TO DUAL BOOT WITH WINDOWS... stop the install and boot back into Windows - use the Windows tools to resize the Windows partition. I have found in the past that Windows does NOT like a non-Windows tool messing with its space!

Right, assuming we are just going to blitz whatever was on the drive before, we tell the installer to use entire disk and then wander off to the kitchen to make a cuppa and maybe snaffle a biscuit or 3. We come back to a completed install, tell it to reboot, extract the USB drive when asked to, press enter and let the sparkly new OS boot to the password prompt, type the really secure password (which I know has been written down someplace so you can use the PC tomorrow morning), press enter and see the new Plasma 6 in front of you :) .

Get your updates done using Discover or the terminal if you prefer, possibly with a reboot if there is a kernel update, then go to System Settings/Networking/ Wifi and Internet and select Firewall. You will need to type your password. In that section, you will see the default options of incoming ignored, outgoing allowed - but you will want to enable the firewall. For a home desktop computer or home laptop you likely won't need to add any rules. Just enable the firewall and go look at the other myriad of settings you can tweak - to be honest, most of the defaults are absolutely fine. I speed up the animation (Workspace/General Behaviour), Slow down the mouse cursor (Input and Output/Mouse and Touchpad) and set the Numlock to turn on each time the PC boots (Input and Output/Keyboard). You can fiddle with power settings, choose a different wall paper, or just have a plain colour if you prefer that.

Once you have the basics set up to your liking, you want to install the Nvidia drivers (this IS after all mostly for Nvidia card owners.). So go to Settings/System Settings/Driver Manager, enter your password, wait a bit while the program checks your system. In my case only the Nvidia graphics card needed drivers not included in the Linux kernel - I selected the 560 version - the 550 version is the tested option, but remember that the 560 version is the reason I chose to run Kubuntu 24.10 in order to better work with Wayland and my games, so I selected that, waited some more until the install was finished, rebooted to start using the Nvidia drivers and begin the next step towards getting my system completed.

Steam gaming: Thanks to Steam and its Proton code, there are games out there only made for Windows that run well (even on my rather old PC)) - and every new release of Proton means more Windows games work, or work better. So my next step is to get Steam plus all its many libraries installed, login and get the games going!

Most PCs these days - and indeed back many years - use 64-bit operating systems. My Kubuntu 24.10 is 64-bit too. Steam needs 32-bit libraries so we head off to that terminal called Konsole found under the System heading in the start menu.

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

sudo apt update

sudo apt install mesa-vulkan-drivers libglx-mesa0:i386 mesa-vulkan-drivers:i386 libgl1-mesa-dri:i386 curl

Now that you have that sorted, you can decide how to get the Steam installer ...um... installed. Kubuntu uses the Ubuntu repositories so you have 3 options - open in the start menu System/Discover and search for Steam. There are 2 methods here. I have not used either on this install. I used a method not generally suggested when running Linux - instead of using my distribution repository, I opened my web browser - typed "steam games" and downloaded the steam.deb file directly from the Steam website, which I know goes into my Downloads folder. I then opened my Konsole terminal again and typed the following commands:

cd Downloads

sudo dpkg -i steam_latest.deb

That should pop up a request to install a selection of other libraries which allows the Steam installer to do its job. Once that all has finished you should have a Games Start-menu option containing Steam. Fire up that, and Steam will do some updates and open to a login window - username and password for Steam and then it sends you an email with a pass code. Get that and watch Steam appear in all its glory !

One more point - some games run natively in Linux - they usually have a visible blue install button in Steam. There are some that appear to run natively, but need help, such as Medieval Total War 2 - Select the game, right-click and choose Properties, then click the Compatibility section, enable Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool. For this game I use version 4.2-9. It is an old game and that version seems to work, even tho the latest version is on 9 at the moment. There are some games that just will not run at all. Also, using Proton (Steams compatibility layer) seems to make the hardware work harder, so a game that just about runs in Windows might not run in Linux simply due to your hardware. Crusader Kings 3 is a good example, at least on my hardware - more accurately, it does run - or rather crawl - primarily due to my 7-year old graphics card, which was very much an average GPU even back when I bought it. Finally there are some games that just will not run no matter what you do - If they are vitally important to your happiness then you will need to either wait until Proton is updated to run them or go back to Windows.