The default Steam install location is . If Steam cannot find it, it will prompt you to reinstall it or select the new location. This article uses the symlink to refer to the install location.
For the available command-line options see the Command Line Options article on the Valve Developer Wiki.
By default Steam simply appends your option string to the launch command. To set environment variables or pass the launch command as an argument to another command you can use the substitute.
It is possible to have Steam start minimized to the system tray, rather than taking focus. Add to the list of command line arguments; see Desktop entries#Modify desktop files for doing this by default.
Steam supports an alternative, minimal UI with just your game list - the store, community and cover collection views are hidden. You can switch to it with View > Small Mode. To go back to the standard UI, select View > Large Mode.
You can also launch steam with this argument:
Valve developed a compatibility tool for Steam Play based on Wine and additional components named Proton. It allows you to launch many Windows games (see compatibility list).
It is open-source and available on GitHub. Steam will install its own versions of Proton when Steam Play is enabled.
"Proton Experimental" is enabled by default on the Steam client: Steam > Settings > Compatibility. You can enable Steam Play for games that have and have not been whitelisted by Valve in that dialog.
Proton supports Easy AntiCheat integration if the developer activates it, however EAC may require a particular patched version of glibc: if a game is been reported to be working but is not in your machine, try using Steam Flatpak because it comes with glibc patched. Additionally, setting the procfs mount option to a hardened value may cause Easy Anti-Cheat to fail with the message "Launch Error: 261".
If needed, to force enable Proton or a specific version of Proton for a game, right click on the game, click Properties > Compatibility > Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool, and select the desired version. Doing so can also be used to force games that have a Linux port to use the Windows version.
You can install proton-cachyos, but extra setup is required to work with Steam. See the Proton GitHub for details on how Steam recognizes Proton installs.
When a controller is plugged in while Steam is running, Steam's default behavior is to leave it alone and let games use it as-is. The gamepad's evdev and joystick devices are exposed by the kernel, and games may use them using APIs such as SDL2 as if Steam were not in the picture.
The Steam Input subsystem offers an abstraction layer which allows for more advanced functionality such as rebinding buttons and axes, having game-specific profiles, and doing higher-level button mappings based on in-game actions. The Steam Input Configurator (SIC) is the part of the system that implements this functionality. To enable Steam Input for a controller, go to Steam > Settings > Controller > External Gamepad Settings. Here you will find toggles to Enable Steam Input corresponding to your controller.
See Steam Input Configurator for configurator usage instructions.
When SIC is enabled for a controller, there are a few different controller devices:
The SIC's behavior is context dependent:
Games are rated on how comprehensive their gamepad support is. This is dependent on the controller model.
In cases where the game does not have full gamepad support, SIC tries to fill the gaps. For example, in Bloons Tower Defense 5, a game that requires you to point and click, Steam will automatically activate the Keyboard (WASD) and Mouse profile, allowing you to use your gamepad to move and click.
To summarize what this all means for usage:
If you wish to completely disable Steam Input, launch steam with the -nojoy argument, and also disable Steam Input for each game individually, as there is no global option for doing so.
Then instruct your display manager to launch gamescope.
The default Steam notification position is bottom right.
You can change the Steam notification position by altering in
Both files are overwritten by Steam on startup and is only read on startup.
You can create a skin to change the notification position to your liking. For example to change the position to top right:
can be overwritten while Steam is running, allowing you to have game-specific notification positions.
See this Steam Community guide on how to setup a headless streaming server on Linux.
If you use Proton (Steam Play) for launching your games, and still keep a Windows installation for some reason (for example, if some game has problems with anti cheat or if you want to make a comparison tests with Windows), you may want to store your games in a common partition instead of keeping two copies of game one per OS.
To add another folder for library, click on Steam > Settings > Downloads > STEAM LIBRARY FOLDERS, then on the ⊕ (Plus) button.
There are four file systems, that can be read/write by both Windows and Linux.
See Using a NTFS disk with Linux and Windows for more information on how to configure that. To launch games from an NTFS drive, follow the steps from Steam/Troubleshooting#Steam Library in NTFS partition.
Using ntfs has disadvantages. It happens often that shaders cache folder becomes corrupted. Messages saying You cannot fix that from linux. You need to boot to Windows and use chkdsk for that.
This filesystem has disadvantage that it is case-insensitive. You will get such message: See issue #7665
Also it is problematic to create symlinks on exfat, so you cannot use the method of symlinking compatdata as in ntfs method.
This filesystem eliminates any potential issues with NTFS and exFAT not supporting filesystem attributes considered normal on Linux, and can be repaired and scrubbed from both system, see Btrfs#Scrub.
When used to share Steam libraries, it's important to setup proper UID/GID mappings to avoid having permission issues.
This filesystem can be used without issue, but to ensure compatibility, it must be formatted to the correct UDF revision. Linux lacks write support for revisions 2.50 and higher. Therefore, revision 2.01 is required for proper functionality.
The UDF block size must match the logical sector size of the partition. This value can be obtained using blockdev(8):
Alternatively, graphical tools like gparted can be used to handle formatting. They correctly manage UDF revision selection to ensure compatibility.
In certain circumstances shader pre-compilation may only use one core, however this can be overridden by the user, example to use 8 cores:
There are compatibility tools other than Proton/Wine.
You can also use protonup-qt to manage them:
Some systems and configurations seem to have issues with HTTP2. Disabling HTTP2 will probably yield faster downloads on those configurations. You can either use the console command or set it in like so:
On hybrid graphics laptops, Steam runs games using the integrated GPU by default. See PRIME#PRIME GPU offloading to switch to the more powerful discrete GPU for specific games.
Steam installed via Flatpak is not able to access your home directory and overriding this will cause Steam to not run because it is not safe. However, you can freely add directories outside the home directory. If you want to add an external library, run the following command to add it:
Launching Steam with Flatpak might warn you about installing the package. This package currently does not exist but game-devices-udev can be installed instead, see Gamepad#Device permissions.
If you are having problem getting Asian fonts to show in game, it is because org.freedesktop.Platform does not include it. First try mounting your local font :
If that does not work, consider this hack: make the fonts available by directly copying the font files into org.freedesktop.Platform's directories, e.g.
After launch, Steam will try to download files and you will see a progress bar. If it crashes, you may try to give additional permissions to the flatpak package:
For an alternative way to control permissions, install flatseal.
This is useful for video cards with a small amount of video memory.
As a result, when launching the Steam Minimal (Runtime) shortcut you will get an ascetic interface, which is still functional enough to install and run games, and when launching the standard Steam (Runtime) shortcut you will get a full-fledged client.