I've installed Ubuntu on a partition on my PC. I've downloaded the offline installers of two games that are easy to run and don't take up a ton of data (Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition and Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition).

Yet nothing happens when I try to launch them?

When I click on the uninstall-BaldursGateEnhancedEdition.sh file, it allows me to uninstall the game, no problem. But nothing happens when I click the start.sh file. It asks me how I want to open it (display, run, run in terminal, cancel) but then nothing happens

Why wouldn't the game run on Linux???

Because you have to make them executable.

Open the terminal and run: Make sure the path is enclosed by quotation marks, just in case.

Then run: Then run the installer by running the command: If you try to run any of those commands but an error appears, please send what appeared in the terminal (use screenshots, copy the whole log as plain text, or whatever, as long as it's readable).

Also worth noting this thread exists: General Linux FAQ and Troubleshooting

It keeps on showing "no such file or directory".

Okay, so I wrote it like that, and now it shows me the following:

Running Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition
./BaldursGate: error while loading shared libraries: libopenal.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

It is best to run them in the command prompt intially at least to see the errors. Linux installers have dependencies which are not installed by the installer.

Googling the name of the missing libraries will tell you which package to install.

In your case:

https://www.google.com/search?q=error+while+loading+shared+libraries%3A+libopenal.so.1&oq=error+while+loading+shared+libraries%3A+libopenal.so.1&aqs=chrome..69i57.228j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

And the first results tells you what you are missing:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/608418/error-while-loading-shared-libraries-libopenal-so-1-game-pacapong-in-ubuntu

Right click on the file and make executable (on Linux Mint they are executable on default), forget the terminal nonsense.

Ubuntu droped 32-bit libraries, to install most of what's needed, open your terminal (Ctrl+pAlt+T) and paste:

sudo apt install libc6:i386 libasound2:i386 libasound2-data:i386 libasound2-plugins:i386 libstdc++6:i386 libx11-6:i386 libxau6:i386 libxcb1:i386 libxcursor1:i386 libxdmcp6:i386 libxext6:i386 libxfixes3:i386 libxinerama1:i386 libxrandr2:i386 libxrender1:i386 libglu1:i386 libudev1:i386

Some of those libraries are missing in many newer distros, on some game pages they are listed on Linux requirements. Copied from Shadow Tactics page

May not solve your issue but you'll need them for future games. The best way to understand why one game won't run is to run them in the terminal, if there's any error will pop up there.

Well, do you mean checking the box, "allow to be executed as a program"? I've done that. Doesn't seem to be working, still. Running it in terminal does nothing, too.

Nothing as in: It runs silently and then exits without any feedback whatsoever (on the terminal)?

Few programs do that on error. They are infuriating to troubleshoot, but most programs actually give some kind of feedback in the logs, especially on error.

Okay, so now it says, "Package libssl1.0.0:i386 is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'libssl1.0.0:i386' has no installation candidate" Well, yes, pretty much. The screen flickers for a bit, but that's that. Nothing is opened when I click on run in terminal.

Now, when I click on the uninstall-BaldursGateEnhancedEdition.sh file and click display in terminal, the terminal does display (on top of the GOG installer icon popping up and asking if I want to delete the game). It says (replaced the numbers with random numbers in case it could doxx me or something):

USING en_US

(process:4646465465): Gtk-WARNING **: 00.33.67.261 Locale not supported by C library.
Using the fallback 'C' locale.
Gtk-Message: 00.33.67.261: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1173587/e-package-libssl1-0-0-has-no-installation-candidate

So in your case, maybe try:

sudo apt install libssl1.1:i386 I don't run the games often in the prompt (only initially when I have to troubleshoot the missing packages, usually after reinstalling my OS during my cleanups), but I believe I see this one all the time when I run the installers in the terminal and everything still runs fine (ie, the installer window pops up and I can successfully install the game).

I think you can ignore this one.

I don't know... is something wrong with me? Am I too dumb for Linux?

Why wouldn't the game just run, as simple as that?

Still nothing happens when I try to run the file, either in terminal or in general

No, the ecosystem for a lot of software in Linux (especially closed commercial software where communities can't freely tinker the code until it is pretty much plug & play) is a little rough around the edge.

If you are at least somewhat familiar with using the terminal (at least, a couple of basic commands) and Googling errors (setting the correct search terms and navigating the results), it's manageable, but it requires a bit of getting used to.

The solutions are all out there (usage is high enough that someone else is extremely likely to have encountered your problems), they just aren't as tightly integrated as they should be.

In marketing lingo, I think Linux Desktop might still be stuck in the chasm between early adopter and early majority. Geeks love it, because it is the same OS they run on the server (meaning the delta between their machine and the server is small and they can troubleshoot a lot of stuff locally on their machine), but for a casual user, it requires some investment (probably more than the average user is prepared to put in).

You might be better off with Linux Mint than Ubuntu. I also installed Ubuntu recently and had problems getting stuff running, which I did not have with Linux Mint.

I guess if you know the problem, it can be solved fast in Ubuntu with searching the INet, but at the moment I would go for Mint as GOG states this is the distribution they support.

Mint will not be any better than Ubuntu for these games. Neither will any up to date distribution. The problem is that Beamdog only build and test against the Steam Runtime, which uses libraries from 2016 and earlier. Modern distributions shop modern versions of the standard cryptography libraries which are not backwards compatible. All Beamdog games have been delivering an inferior experience on GOG. Personally, I point the GOG launchers at my Steam Runtime using the LD_PRELOAD or LD_LIBRARY_PATH system variables to get these games running, but if you don't have Steam installed you'll need to source the old versions of the required libraries from somewhere else (or run a distribution from 2016 - not recommended!).

See my post at https://www.gog.com/forum/baldurs_gate_series/bgee_bg2ee_iwdee_and_pstee_all_4_still_fail_to_run_on_3_different_linux_distros_mint/post4 for an example.

To be honest there needs to be a far saner way of packaging games for Linux in a developer friendly "long term stable" format that actually includes all required dependencies than the current Linux philosophy of "we haven't included half the dependencies we need as we expect them to be part of the distro but as time goes by the distro will remove them so the game needs to constantly update or die" dependency hell. That might work for open source apps Firefox, VLC, etc, but many closed source older games that are long finished will not be updated (and often there's no-one around to update them, eg, developer went out of business / was acquired / even lost the source code (that's why there's no IceWind Dale 2 EE), etc). AppImage or something like that? I don't know, but there's got to be a better solution than current "break sh*t and shrug" situation.