On KDE I couldn’t get Steam to put my game library on my second harddrive. It would open up the file finder, then simply ignore whatever folder I picked (regardless of drive and folder permissions). I was able to recreate the issue on Gnome under wayland, but X11 works fine. I even tried making a symlink to the other drive in my home directory, no dice. Tried flatpak steam as well as valve’s installer script; nada.
Interestingly, it seems that the “pick a folder” button in Steam opens up a contextual file search window in X, but just a regular nautilus instance in Wayland. I’d say that this is the problem (the regular nautilus/dolphin instance not reporting back to Steam what folder I selected), but it works for moving to different directories, just not drives (in both DEs). Same thing happened on Fedora, so it’s not just “Debian is too outdated.”
But let’s be serious, if I wanted to spend a lot of time tweaking and tuning my graphical environment to be exactly what I want, I’m not settling for Gnome nor KDE. I’m not gonna go with Cinnamon, XFCE, LXQt, LMDE, MATE, nor any ecosystem. I’m going with a window manager and mixing and matching every single program/element myself.
I use i3 on my laptops. I would use Sway (because I don’t have to care about Steam), but for some reason it’s like 5x as resource hungry on these machines (constant freezes and stuttering).
Tried with root and user perms for the drive, tried with 777 on the folder and whatever permissions steam uses when it creates the folder. The drive is ext4 and mounts fine.
What does any of this have to do with KDE, Gnome, or nautilus? If symlinks aren’t working, I’d dedicate an entire drive to Steam by mounting that drive (with matching permissions) right where Steam expects to find them. You can mount a filesystem/disc/ISO/drive/network share practically anywhere you want. If your network is fast enough, I bet you could even access your games over NFS, though I wouldn’t recommend it.
Yes, I read your comment. It’s okay if you didn’t understand my comment. Clearly you don’t understand how filesystems and drive mounting works under Linux or the role of desktop environments in managing filesystems, mounting, and permissions. I don’t doubt that you’re genuinely struggling here, but there is no call for that kind of hostility. You might have some hope for figuring it out if you open your mind to the fact that you don’t fully understand what your problem is.
Steam expects the games to be in a particular place with a particular set of permissions and ownership relative to the user(s) and/or group(s) expected to use those game files. I’m telling that Linux doesn’t care where those files physically reside. You can tell Steam that those files are exactly where Steam expects them to be at the filesystem level, without messing with Steam configs, nautilus, gnome, or KDE. There are several ways to do this, but without understanding the requirements of your machine no one here will be able to give you effective advice.
I’ve seen some other comments from you about running something or other as root or just blanket chmods to 777 and I can tell you from experience that those are rarely effective solutions and can sometimes make things worse (just try something like that when configuring ssh configs, keys, and permissions).
Almost guaranteed a Flatpak thing. I know you said X11 versus Wayland was your issue, but likely some quirk of the two window managers was allowing it to work.
Adding the drive path in Flatseal or installing non-Flatpak Steam would likely fix it.
I’d be curious if using https://gist.github.com/davispuh/6600880 or configuration files for Steam that would be the kind of things fixed bypassing integration bugs in the UI. I didn’t try as I didn’t have that problem.
On KDE I couldn’t get Steam to put my game library on my second harddrive. It would open up the file finder, then simply ignore whatever folder I picked (regardless of drive and folder permissions). I was able to recreate the issue on Gnome under wayland, but X11 works fine. I even tried making a symlink to the other drive in my home directory, no dice. Tried flatpak steam as well as valve’s installer script; nada.
Interestingly, it seems that the “pick a folder” button in Steam opens up a contextual file search window in X, but just a regular nautilus instance in Wayland. I’d say that this is the problem (the regular nautilus/dolphin instance not reporting back to Steam what folder I selected), but it works for moving to different directories, just not drives (in both DEs). Same thing happened on Fedora, so it’s not just “Debian is too outdated.”
But let’s be serious, if I wanted to spend a lot of time tweaking and tuning my graphical environment to be exactly what I want, I’m not settling for Gnome nor KDE. I’m not gonna go with Cinnamon, XFCE, LXQt, LMDE, MATE, nor any ecosystem. I’m going with a window manager and mixing and matching every single program/element myself.
I use i3 on my laptops. I would use Sway (because I don’t have to care about Steam), but for some reason it’s like 5x as resource hungry on these machines (constant freezes and stuttering).
Sounds like either a permission issue, format of your drive, or a mounting issue to me.
Tried with root and user perms for the drive, tried with 777 on the folder and whatever permissions steam uses when it creates the folder. The drive is ext4 and mounts fine.
Were you using the flatpak version of Steam?
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What does any of this have to do with KDE, Gnome, or nautilus? If symlinks aren’t working, I’d dedicate an entire drive to Steam by mounting that drive (with matching permissions) right where Steam expects to find them. You can mount a filesystem/disc/ISO/drive/network share practically anywhere you want. If your network is fast enough, I bet you could even access your games over NFS, though I wouldn’t recommend it.
It doesn’t matter where or how I mount the drive, the problem isn’t the drive; idk how I could have made that clearer.
The problem only happens under KDE and Gnome on Wayland; the nautilus thing was just a curiosity. Did you read my comment?
Yes, I read your comment. It’s okay if you didn’t understand my comment. Clearly you don’t understand how filesystems and drive mounting works under Linux or the role of desktop environments in managing filesystems, mounting, and permissions. I don’t doubt that you’re genuinely struggling here, but there is no call for that kind of hostility. You might have some hope for figuring it out if you open your mind to the fact that you don’t fully understand what your problem is.
Steam expects the games to be in a particular place with a particular set of permissions and ownership relative to the user(s) and/or group(s) expected to use those game files. I’m telling that Linux doesn’t care where those files physically reside. You can tell Steam that those files are exactly where Steam expects them to be at the filesystem level, without messing with Steam configs, nautilus, gnome, or KDE. There are several ways to do this, but without understanding the requirements of your machine no one here will be able to give you effective advice.
I’ve seen some other comments from you about running something or other as root or just blanket chmods to 777 and I can tell you from experience that those are rarely effective solutions and can sometimes make things worse (just try something like that when configuring ssh configs, keys, and permissions).
Almost guaranteed a Flatpak thing. I know you said X11 versus Wayland was your issue, but likely some quirk of the two window managers was allowing it to work.
Adding the drive path in Flatseal or installing non-Flatpak Steam would likely fix it.
I don’t generally do flatpaks, I just tried it to see if it would remove the issue
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I’d be curious if using https://gist.github.com/davispuh/6600880 or configuration files for Steam that would be the kind of things fixed bypassing integration bugs in the UI. I didn’t try as I didn’t have that problem.
I’ll give it a shot next time I have some time, thank you!