13 Replies
Adding Steam itself as a sideloaded game and giving it the launch parameters of
-applaunch GameIdHere should workFor example:
If you're using the Flatpak version of Heroic, I don't think this is possible there right now
correct-apricot•2y ago
xdg-open steam://run/appId
rival-blackOP•2y ago
Hmm interesting
Are there any alternative ways to install and launch steam games where I don't need Steam installed at all?
I'm having issues with Steam itself which I haven't been able to fix yet
That's not possible for most games
You can download servers and such with SteamCMD, but most games require Steam itself to be running (DRM)
correct-apricot•2y ago
what exactly, maybe someone here will be able to help
rival-blackOP•2y ago
I'm guessing it's a bug in my impermanence setup or my filesystem
So, the issue is quite weird. It first happened when I installed CS2. Steam would become unresponsive and CS2 would fail to launch (I had already played it once initially so the game wasn't bugged). When I tried to debug it, I noticed a few things:
- When the bug happens, Steam becomes unresponsive
- I cannot close it at all
- When I try running
ls .steam or ls .local/share/Steam, it doesn't respond! Just gets stuck.
- When I shut down my system, a stop job runs for my user which essentially unmounts my btrfs subvolumes
- This stop job takes ages to complete as it gets stuck on .steam and .local/share/Steam
- I resort to force shutdown which doesn't seem to break anything further on the next boot.
- When I launch my system, everything works until Steam is launched. I can perform ls .steam et al without issues. But this breaks as soon as I launch Steam once.
I fixed this incident by removing .steam and .local/share/Steam from my impermanence setup. Which causes me to believe the issue lies with the aforementioned impermanence module using bindfs instead of symlinks to manage the linking.
After removing this, everything worked fine for a while and I added these directories back into my impermanence config. That fortunately didn't bring the issue back; although I haven't run CS2 since then which might again invoke this issue. Albeit I installed Terraria and played it many times without this bug coming back; until today.
I tried installing GTAV after which the downloads graph kinda just froze. I couldn't pause the download either. Even checking the games in my library would just get Steam stuck at loading. This exact bug happened again. Same symptoms as last time that I mentioned above.
cc @Doogie (M.D.)
Steam installer?
I also suspect this bug might be one of the following:
- Corrupted /nix/store
- Bugged Steam Runtimecorrect-apricot•2y ago
basic Steam Runtime is just
LD_LIBRARY_PATH thing
games themselves are ran in containers afaikrival-blackOP•2y ago
Another thing to note:
When this error happened today, I tried running
ls .heroic, which exists in the same btrfs subvolume, and that broke as well. Fixed when I rebooted and broke again when I launched Steam. So whatever this bug is, it's corrupting my entire subvolume
Ah true. I'm guessing that then installs into .local/share/Steam
So many things are interlinked in this bug
Removing steam from impermanence fixes the issue
Having the issue with Steam breaks all things in the same subvolume
I see
Yes, my ~ is mounted on tmpfs, my RAM
Not on disk
You could say that that's the root of all my issues
Yes, but the things I mention in impermanence mounts my btrfs subvols to it
So not RAM anymore for those directories
But RAM everywhere else
Well, the entire / actually, not just home
Yeah, my friend who uses Nix also uses Steam and it works fine for him. He also has the same impermanence setup I have
Only key difference would be that he has a DE and I don't.
Oh he also doesn't use BTRFS
I don't think there's much room for user error since I can't see any single big thing that could've triggered this
Steam works fine otherwise and this only happened two times, one with CS2 and second with installing GTAV
Subvolumes are originally mounted at a directory /foo and the impermanence setup essentially maps things to ~/foo or whatever paths you specify
I agree, this is likely not a bug with Steam. I'm thinking of simply not persisting Steam at all which would trigger the ~300 MB download each time I run Steam but at least everything will work
Yeah, I hope so
Thanks a ton for looking into my issue <3rival-blackOP•2y ago
Didn't automatically ig
rival-blackOP•2y ago
I did this
rival-blackOP•2y ago
Nvm, it worked. I had to change
/usr/bin/steam to what my system has