Everything worked fine up until a couple of weeks ago. A few games still work, but most do not. They produce various errors about being unable to open shared libraries, for example:
The NVIDIA driver was unable to open 'libnvidia-glvkspirv.so.525.147.05'. This library is required at run time.
or
ALSA lib dlmisc.c:337:(snd_dlobj_cache_get0) Cannot open shared library libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so (libpulsecommon-15.99.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)
Couldn't open audio: ALSA: Couldn't open audio device: No such device or address
[!!!ERROR!!!] Couldn't open audio: ALSA: Couldn't open audio device: No such device or address
or
Exception in thread "LWJGL Application" java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
at com.badlogic.gdx.backends.lwjgl.LwjglGraphics.setVSync(LwjglGraphics.java:558)
at com.badlogic.gdx.backends.lwjgl.LwjglApplication$1.run(LwjglApplication.java:124)
Caused by: java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 0
at org.lwjgl.opengl.LinuxDisplay.getAvailableDisplayModes(LinuxDisplay.java:954)
at org.lwjgl.opengl.LinuxDisplay.init(LinuxDisplay.java:738)
at org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.<clinit>(Display.java:138)
... 2 more
AL lib: (EE) alc_cleanup: 1 device not closed
which google tells me is caused by LWJGL being unable to open the xrandr library.
The mentioned libraries are currently installed on the host system:
al@al-desktop:~$ dpkg -S libnvidia-glvkspirv.so
libnvidia-gl-525:i386: /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libnvidia-glvkspirv.so.525.147.05
libnvidia-gl-525:amd64: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnvidia-glvkspirv.so.525.147.05
al@al-desktop:~$ dpkg -S libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so
libasound2-plugins:amd64: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/alsa-lib/libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so
The other regular error message happens when steam itself loads and is a dbus-related error:
steam-runtime-launcher-service[105335]: E: Unable to acquire bus name "com.steampowered.PressureVessel.LaunchAlongsideSteam"
Steam Runtime Launch Service: steam-runtime-launcher-service pid 105335 exited
Steam Runtime Launch Service: steam-runtime-launcher-service keeps crashing on startup, disabling
I checked the session bus and nothing is holding this name, so it must be a confinement error.
The runtime launcher service seems to be the program responsible for setting up the runtime environment with libraries from the host, so this would explain why those libraries are suddenly missing.
Also, running the affected games directly from the CLI works fine, at least for the ones that don’t have DRM.