I discovered that setting the LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 environment variable in Steam’s launch options completely eliminates the graphical glitches that plagued the Onlink mod for Uplink on Linux. After struggling with libsdl issues and Wine rendering problems, this fix made Onlink work without graphical glitches.

The mod is supposed to run natively on Linux, but many users hit issues with dependencies or weird artifacts when running the Windows version through Wine. The software rendering approach bypasses these hardware acceleration issues entirely.

Download the Linux version and extract both data.dat and onlink to the Uplink directory. Make the executable runnable with chmod +x onlink, then edit run_steam.sh to point to ./onlink instead of ./uplink.bin.x86.

In Steam’s launch options, add:

LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1

It’s working when the title screen shows “Onlink” without glitches. The performance impact is negligible since Uplink isn’t graphically demanding, but the compatibility improvement is huge.

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