Hi There!

This might be an unusual first post of a new member, but I wanted to get these thoughts out of my system.

I use Linux as my only gaming OS for about seven years now and I love it most of the time. I'm OK with having to tweak many games and/or having to live with performance issues or bugs.
Yes, sometimes I'm frustrated because I can't play a specific game, but on the other hand, there are so many great games, that most of the time simply play a different one.

Recently I bought a new Tuxedo-Gaming-Laptop, because my old one was getting too unreliable. My gaming budget is not very high so this means that I won't be able to buy full-priced games for some time that easily. But that was totally fine. When Diablo IV came out and made a great first impression, I did not even flinch because I would have to wait some time until I could afford it.

Enter Baldur's Gate 3. I love RPGs and all over sudden all of my coworkers were talking about, how great the game is, and what they had done at this point in the game and so on.
Of course I was intrigued. I watched a few Youtube Videos, checked ProtonDB for compatibility Issues, thought about it for a few days, shuffled some money around and finally bought it.

One reason was, that I really wanted to dive in a beautiful, high fantasy, classic RPG with complex characters and decisions that matter. And everyone and their dog said that BG 3 had exactly this. I played a pen & paper RPG (not D&D) in my youth, so I was also keen on exploring this new System (for some reason I had never connected to any D&D game).
I also had another, even more important reason to buy the game:
I suffer from Depression and longed to participate in the experience, everyone was talking about. I wanted to have something shiny and new. Something to look forward to, when I come home to work, something that I could enjoy for myself.
And since the game has gold-status on protonDB and I have a new computer I even would not have to worry about running it smoothly.

But it did not run smoothly, worse it sometimes did not run at all. I bought it on GOG, installed it with Heroic and Lutris and either way I had significant performance issues: Lags, low framerates and pauses in dialogs because the game needed longer to calculate and load the next sentence of a character than it took to finish the previous one.
And the fact that the launcher complained about old nvidia dirvers (which were up-to-date, according to Discover) or corrupted files did not boost my confidence either.
But at least it ran (or rather, walked if you excuse my pun).

Than came Patch #2. First Heroic would not install it because I allegedly had not enough space, although 20 to 30 GB of my drive were empty. So i saved my save files, and re-installed it over night, only to have massive texture errors that rendered the game unplayable.
It took my some time to notice, that the game REQUIRES the use of Proton-Experimental to run. So far I only had experienced the requirement for a specific Wine or Proton Version for older or more obscure games and had not paid much attention to the mentions of Proton-Experimental, especially because some users specifically used Version 8.something.

But after I figured that out, the game ran as well as never before. I was finally able to enjoy this masterpiece of a game. I even began a new character to avoid some mistakes I made before.

But last Friday Patch #3 happened. Of course I was not expecting Heroic to just install the update, although I had even more free disk space than the last time (I had re-installed the whole system in the meantime). So, I removed the game, but kept the configuration and started the installation again. To my surprise the process began at 87%, what baffled me without further consequence. I had planed an over night installation and did not alter my plan, because it was already late.
On Saturday, I started the game with the familiar old-driver-corrupted-data-pop-up in the launcher only to have texture issues AGAIN.
I decided to re-install the game without keeping the configs and never saw the Main Menu again.
Since then the game crashes every single time I try to start it. With DirectX it crashes to the desktop and the launcher wants to send a crash report, with Vulkan I need to use xkill.

And here Endeth my journey.
I am frustrated. Very frustrated. Not only because the game does not run, but because (as so many times before) it seems that I am the ONLY person on the whole f*ing planet, who has the problem.
For the issues I had prior, I did not find a single hint online, that worked for me, even when I found someone who had the same texture problem that I had after Patch #2.
And now I can not find a single Patch #3 related issue at all. So it seems that I am the only moron who can not get this game to run.
And I've spent many hours or even days of my life combing through forums in search of bits and pieces that would help me with my issues. And yes, I know that more often than not the problem IS in front of the screen (as proven by the whole Proton-Experimental thing).

But this time, it is too much!
I needed this game to work! Even if it miraculously would work tomorrow, I could not enjoy it, in fear that the next patch (or even package Update on my System) could destroy it without warning or trace.
And to add insult to injury, one week prior to buying the game, I decided (for all the right reasons) NOT to buy the tickets to a concert that one of my favorite bands was giving only an one-hour-ride away from me, that I already hat in my cart and which was sold out in under seven minutes and that cost roughly the same that BG3.

Thank you for reading this long text.
I do not expect you to reply anything or offer technical support.
I just needed a place to whine and vent.

I hope you'll have a great gaming experience on Linux, no matter the issues we as Playing Penguins are facing.
Have a great day!