Hello all.

Is anyone else having any issues getting the game past the launcher on Ubuntu 18.04? It plays fine when running directly from a terminal, but when I run from the GNOME menu shortcut, my session crashes when I click the Play button and I'm kicked back to my login screen. It's worth noting that I am able to run the game from a terminal. I've tried modifying the shortcut to run start.sh from a terminal rather than directly, but I still crash after clicking Play when running it this way.

I have both Intel and Nvidia GPUs, and I've tried using both PRIME profiles to no avail. Also tried updating my graphics drivers.

Anybody else having any issues that resemble this?

EDIT: To clarify, if I open a terminal, navigate to the game directory, and run start.sh manually, the game runs fine. If I modify the shortcut to open a terminal window and run the game, it crashes.

I have the same issue - also quitting the game seems to kill my linux user session - this doesn't happen when running the Steam or Paradox Launcher versions of Stellaris

Yep, I experience this as well.

Wow. I accidentally just marked this as solved. Any way that I can reverse that, since we really don't have a solution yet?

Same here.

Tried to launch the game using shortcut on Ubuntu, and got kicked back to the login screen when I clicked "Play".

Tried the same thing on Antergos Linux, and had slightly better luck, in that the game started when I clicked "Play", but got kicked back to the login screen when I exited the game.

Spent a while trying to diagnose the problem, but, in the end I just contacted GOG support. Hopefully a solution won't be too far off, but it's not a major problem, just a minor inconvenience, since I can always launch the game from the command line.

So thanks to the other thread on starting the game without going to the launcher, I've successfully gotten into the game. Now the session is crashing on exiting the game as blakstar found under Antergos. Still, this is progress.

EDIT: I've gotten the game working "properly" using the following in my Exec line in the .desktop file: I put properly in quotations because the terminal window crashes on exit rather than waiting for you to press enter, which is what the read line should do. The user session stays open however, so you're not kicked back to the login screen. It's not ideal, but it's good enough for me for now until we have a better fix.

I've managed to get it working with a slightly shorter version of the command you gave, and still have access to the launcher:

Nice! I could have sworn I had tried that and it still crashed, but evidently not. Just gave it a shot and it worked. I've heard back from support, and it seems that they're going to blame it on my graphics card. I'm running it on a Geforce 920mx with 2GB of RAM. The game runs flawlessly when I get into it, and this doesn't seem like a graphics card issue to me. From what I've been given to understand, Paradox's games aren't particularly GPU heavy either.

From my experience, it's not a graphics card issue -- I've had the same results on two different PC setups, one with an AMD APU with integrated Radeon graphics, and the other with an nVidia 6GB GTX 1060.

If it were down to the graphics cards, the PC would not even be able to run the game properly from the start.sh script invoked from the command line.

It seems that. as far as I can tell, the game runs better if a terminal session is open, by whatever means.

BTW I'm also in contact with GOG support, and I've been sending them the results of my various experiments in launching the game -- even the support assistant (and myself as well, in this regard!) seems to be confused by the fact that the game launched via icon crashes, while the terminal invoked method works properly.

Well, from my discussions with GOG support, it would appear that they don't actually know what's causing the problem, so it would appear that, at the moment, using the terminal or altering the icon's executable, as discussed in this thread, seem to be the only options currently available.

I was offered a refund, but running the game from the terminal isn't hugely inconvenient -- it's just mildly frustrating that the game won't run properly when its icon is clicked, given that every other GOG game that I own runs just fine! :-)

Out of curiosity, I decided to try running CK2 directly from the executable by modifying the gnome menu shortcut. Lo and behold it killed my session and kicked me out to the login screen upon exiting. So it seems like a Paradox issue, not a GOG issue. There's no issue when you run it through Steam, which I suspect is why it has gone mostly unreported until now.

I suspected it might be a Paradox issue, but didn't have any of their other Linux games installed at the moment. Thanks for providing confirmation.

I'm now installing CK2 as well, in order to try and determine what's going on.

I still don't get it why sometimes the launcher works and sometimes it just crashes. It just seems so random.

Interesting... very interesting... I just tried Crusader Kings II, in Ubuntu BTW, and it ran without giving me access to any DLC in the launcher, but crashed when I exited, just as Stellaris did when I tested it in Antergos -- please note, I performed the Antergos test just to make sure that the Stellaris crash wasn't confined to Ubuntu.

However, when I altered the icon's command line, just as I did in Stellaris, Crusader Kings II ran normally, giving me full access to the DLC in the launcher, and not crashing back to the login screen at any point.

The only minor problem I got was when the game had fully loaded, it sent me back to the desktop, but the game was still running -- I only had to bring the game back into focus by clicking on the taskbar icon.

From what I can tell, and as Kaaedus originally pointed out, it definitely seems to be a Paradox issue. I guess the only remaining thing is to kick it back to GOG support, and let them know.