THE FINALS
Linux Troubleshooting Guide
This fan-made page is intended to help players resolve various common problems when playing THE FINALS using Valve's Proton translation layer. It DOES NOT cover WINE, or Proton prefixes which are executed using external tools (e.g. Lutris) as these each have varying levels of compatibility. Only Valve's official Proton and the GloriousEggroll fork from Github will be covered here.
I don't shy away from using computer nerd jargon here. I like being extremely informative. If something sounds confusing, feel free to ask questions on THE FINALS official Discord server. In the Bug Reports forum there is a very large Linux Help Center thread where you can ask for clarification. Needless to say, a lot of the solutions listed here will require administrator permission on your computer to set up.
Game bugs on all platforms will be marked with a cracked Nama Tama icon, while issues which happen exclusively on Linux will be marked with a Tux icon. I'll try to focus on mostly Linux-only issues but there are inevitably a few of Embark's own problems that must be addressed to clear up any confusion, things like connection failures and weird graphical bugs.
If you have any additional information or need to correct something on this page, you can contact me at:
Jabber: bonkmaykr@worlio.com
Discord: @bonkmaykr
Plain old Email: bonkmaykr@screwgravity.net
Special thanks to Ikci
Game crashes at startup after new weekly update or season releases
Sometimes updates to Unreal Engine 5 can expose incompatibilities with Proton. Valve's upstream usually fixes these in 24 hours or less. Your best bet is to submit a report to the Git issue, make sure you are using the nightly version of Proton Experimental, and then wait it out. Pay attention to the Linux Help Center thread in THE FINALS official Discord server for updates if you have access.
To change to Proton Experimental, right click THE FINALS in your Steam library, select Properties, select Compatibility, then check "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool". You can then search for Proton Experimental in your list of games, open the properties menu there, and under "Betas" change the update branch to "bleeding-edge".
Random freezing/exiting during gameplay
THE FINALS tends to leak a lot of heap memory and I/O handles which causes the game to hit Linux's upper limits very quickly. You can change what limits the Linux kernel enforces onto THE FINALS, within what's reasonably expected for your hardware--if you are physically running out of RAM then there is not a whole lot you can do.
The two things you will want to change is the maximum memory map and the maximum open file descriptors. The former may already be set as high as necessary depending on which distribution you use.
Add "vm.max_map_count=(desired number)" to /etc/sysctl.conf. Then run "sudo sysctl -p" to apply your changes immediately. The recommended value is at least 1048576. But you can even set this number to an absurd one like 999999999999 if you really want and Linux will accept it, go bonkers.
Now add the following lines to the end of /etc/security/limits.conf, replacing "myusername" with your account name or your preferred permission group:
myusername hard nofile 200000
myusername soft nofile 200000
Anticheat problems (Kicked from server: TFGE0027)
This happens when EAC either does not start correctly or when a purity check fails on your client. Think of this as Embark's version of sv_pure. This error message is kind of random and happens for all sorts of reasons, and never 100% of the time, but it can be heavily mitigated. On some computers it never happens at all.
First, try adding PROTON_USE_EAC_LINUX=1 to your environment variables. For example, in the Steam launch options, you might put "PROTON_USE_EAC_LINUX=1 %command%". Steam will replace %command% with "proton Discovery.exe" automatically. If this does not work, make sure that THE FINALS is installed to an EXT partition since NTFS drivers on Linux can cause weird issues with a few games, even if you've configured it correctly. You may also want to try backing up your save files and then erasing the Proton prefix, then replacing the graphics and input configs. Sometimes save corruption can cause you to be kicked.
Finally, always start a new game session in the Practice Range when playing on Linux, just to be safe. This issue only ever happens when the game is first started and then persists throughout the same game session, so if you queue successfully once you will never have any problems again until the next restart. Likewise, if you get kicked with TFGE0027 the first time, it will just keep happening until you reload the game. Restarting the game is the only guaranteed workaround. If you crash during a ranked match, cross your fingers. 🙏
Steam overlay does not work
Try downgrading to Proton 9.
Raytracing does not work on NVIDIA cards
Add PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 to your environment variables. For example: "PROTON_USE_EAC_LINUX=1 PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 %command%"
Various connection problems (Server connection timed out TFGE0003, world and movement freezing)
This is a bug introduced in THE FINALS Season 3. There is nothing you can do but report it to Embark when it happens and hope they FINALLY fix it.
(ba-dum pssshhhhhh)
Poor performance / Excessive input lag
THE FINALS has never exactly been a well optimized game, even though Embark tries their absolute best, but there are a lot of outside factors which can hinder your performance too. The way your graphics adapters and your GUI are set up on Linux can make a huge difference between a playable Windows-like experience, and an interactive Powerpoint slideshow. There will be lots of NVIDIA bashing here.
If you have Feral's Gamemode installed, enable it by adding "gamemoderun" to your launch options before %command%. This runs THE FINALS with lots of micro-optimizations which should help smooth things out for you, and it's very easy to do.
The rest of this section gets extremely niche and technical, so new users may want additional help.
Starting with the obvious, if you have an NVIDIA GeForce graphics card, run "lspci -v" in the terminal and look for your GTX/RTX whatever. Make sure it's running the official Game Ready drivers and not the open-source Mesa drivers. It should say "Kernel driver in use: nvidia". If it says nouveau, you've got a tofu driver and you need to replace it with some real meat. Nouveau, while being an ambitious project, is notoriously terrible especially on GeForce cards made after Maxwell (a.k.a. Every single video card that THE FINALS officially supports). Unless you're an expert willing to take risks, also make sure the NVIDIA package you installed came from your repo's package manager and not the NVIDIA website, broken drivers are never fun to have.
Try different desktop environments, compositors, and display protocols. KWin and GNOME 3 are known to suffer severe performance issues when using their built-in X11 compositors, especially in multi-monitor setups. Picom also experiences issues when using the egl renderer and can cut your THE FINALS framerate tenfold. Turning off the compositor, or using a lighter WM/DE like XFCE, Trinity or Openbox may work around this. KDE Plasma should have a built-in option enabled by default to disable compositor effects when an OpenGL or Vulkan game is running. If you're using Wayland, temporarily switch to an X session to see if anything changes. Likewise if you are on X and not on NVIDIA, try out Wayland. Different combinations of GUI parts will all behave differently. Under no circumstances should you use Gamescope on NVIDIA cards as it relies on xwayland, which is known to be picky about GeForce hardware.
"This game requires SecureBoot on capable hardware."
Enabling Secure Boot on Linux is kind of a mess, as most motherboards only come with Microsoft's signatures pre-installed. If you are very tech-savvy, you can try to set up secure boot yourself. Though according to a few of the players who have had this problem, it doesn't matter and the game will just kick you out anyway. I've been able to play the game without enabling secure boot, and players who got this error reported needing to change accounts.
Your best bet is to just contact Embark support and cross your fingers, since it seems like this is an anticheat flag on their end depending on your account history and it doesn't play nice with EAC for Linux. On the bright side, account flags like this are only set when you perform suspiciously well, so the majority of you will never face this problem. Let's put an F in the chat for our Diamondbros who can't play anymore...
Cursor snaps to the corner of the screen when using the communication wheel
This is a less common problem since it only affects very old desktop environments without a built-in sensitivity setting. If you use modern KDE Plasma or GNOME, and you adjust your mouse settings using the provided control panel, this should never happen to you.
The cause of this problem seems to be an issue with the way X11 handles calls to XWarpPointer when the sensitivity is adjusted with the xinput command. If you used xinput to change your mouse sensitivity in your xinitrc, you need to reset it back to 1x when launching THE FINALS. This also affects other games such as Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. Most native Linux programs aren't affected by this, with some glaring exceptions being Minecraft and Blender.
I run this command whenever I launch THE FINALS, and then run it again set to 0.43 to change my mouse settings back when I'm done playing:
xinput set-prop 'SteelSeries SteelSeries Rival 3' 'Coordinate Transformation Matrix' 1.0 0 0 0 1.0 0 0 0 1