Black Mesa with Proton works exceptionally better than Linux version of the game. However, it still crashes a lot more than usual.

Well, the game kept running fine till Surface Tension. I guess the closed area was okay for Proton to run but open area levels are too much. The game hangs and then starts automatically. Right now, it did hang but never started again. So I had to shut it down in Ubuntu 23.10. This is very bad as Black Mesa was suppose to work on any Linux distribution as mentioned on their page. It does not even work properly with proton.

I thought I had the game in a semi-playable state for a while, but I just came back after a long break and it seems like some updates borked it again. The -vulkan parameter no longer seems to work for launching my game. The game is also considerably brighter, I had to turn the brightness all the way down and it's still too bright. This is playing public-beta with ProtonGE on max settings. The lighting is super weird too, it's like low quality - almost like when you watch a low bitrate video and the dark parts are covered in black crush pixels.

Anyway, my PC was struggling to keep up in Gonarch's Lair (which was the last part I left it off on) and it crashed after trying to bring up the Steam Overlay. I'll have to turn some settings down to make it playable but I'm still wondering about those weird graphical issues. Everything looks glazed over.

Turns out my issue with the lighting was related to gamma, and it only happens when I'm fullscreen. When I set the game to windowed or borderless windowed it looks the way it should. This isn't optimal for me because I have a 4K monitor and it struggles to keep up on ultra settings, so I have to compensate. I would rather play in 1080p but I can't without the gamma making the game look like garbage.

Also, the -vulkan parameter seemed to work after I tried it again, but I can't be sure because Mangohud is currently broken on the Steam Flatpak.

Originally posted by Faisal Aslam:

Black Mesa with Proton works exceptionally better than Linux version of the game. However, it still crashes a lot more than usual.

Can you please specify, how to download and install exactly Windows version of the game on linux? Some beta-branch? Or just switch on compatibility mode and reinstall?

I found that setting "dynamic lights quality" to "potato" fixes the flashlight for me.
But the game is too dark...

Other than that, it works ok so far, no crashes (on radeon 7800xt with 16GB VRAM, 32GB RAM, linux 6.7.6, mesa 24.0.1).

Originally posted by Lesnoy Dyatel:

Can you please specify, how to download and install exactly Windows version of the game on linux? Some beta-branch? Or just switch on compatibility mode and reinstall?

Yes changing the compatibility tool in the properties of the game to some version of proton should be enough.

I'm getting black textures with the native version, switching to Proton fixes that and gives me around 20% more fps.

Not only does the flash light not actually make dark areas visible at all they stay pitch black but areas can also be pitch black when there are other light sources that should keep the area lit. Walking just a few feet in any direction when out in the open can cause the landscape or room to go from fully visible as intended to total darkness like your stuck in a pit or tunnel with no light source. The only way to see anything consistently is use the windows version (I'm dual booting) or proton. This is on two different computers with separate linux os's currently using bazzite os.

Video settings too high perhaps? You don't mention hardware.