While I’ll be one of the first to shout to the heavens that 2026 will be the year of gaming on Linux, I’ll also be quick to admit that the scene is definitely not perfect. Sometimes you need to perform some tweaking to get a game running just right, and hopefully, with all the advancements that Linux devs have been making over the years,
Unfortunately, someone has discovered that the way you launch your game matters if you set launch conditions on Steam. And while someone had already reported the issue several years ago, it’s still a problem today.
Related
GOG has already started working on Linux gaming as it says they’re “a big fan” of the OS
GOG is hitting the ground running with its FOSS support.
Running a game via the Steam system tray will disregard your launch issues
The problem has been around for a while now
Over on the Linux Gaming subreddit, user Reasonable-Flow3984 had noticed something odd with their Steam games. Whenever they launched their games via the Steam library, the games worked as intended; however, if they right-clicked the Steam icon in the system tray and launched the game from the menu that pops up, the game ended up being unstable.
Turns out, if you launch a game from that right-click menu, Steam doesn’t register the launch options you have set up for it. That means the game runs without any of your tweaks and is more prone to erroring out. Launching the game through your library correctly applies your options.
Here are some examples that Reasonable-Flow3984 noted with their games:
7 Days to Die (Critical Stability): I specifically set the game to “Launch without EAC” for stability.
Launching via Library: Respects the setting.
Launching via Systray: Bypasses the setting and forces the EAC version anyway.
The Result: On my NVIDIA/Wayland setup (RTX 2080), this forced EAC launch causes massive synchronization stutters that trigger a hardware safety measure, locking the GPU into the P3 Power State (Idle). Performance drops to near-zero until a full driver restart.
Where Winds Meet (Configuration Error): I have the game configured to use DirectX 12.
Launching via Library: Starts in DX12 as expected.
Launching via Systray: Ignores the preference and forces DirectX 11 mode instead.
The Result: This causes the game to re-compile shaders constantly and disables DX12-specific graphical features and optimizations.
But here’s the kicker: the bug has been around since at least March 2019. Someone opened a GitHub report for the bug on the Steam for Linux page, and when Reasonable-Flow3984 made their own report, a moderator marked it as a duplicate and rolled it into the old one. Here’s hoping Valve gets a fix out.