Basically the title.
Flatpak Steam works for me. Can’t say I find any difference from native.
I ran that until I needed to install games on a different disk. Impossible for me on Arch.
You can do this with the Flatpak version of Steam, but you have to give it access to the disks.
Flatseal is the easiest way to do this.
- Open Flatseal
- select Steam
- scroll down to the “Filesystem” section
- click on the + icon on the “Other files” area
- either put in the full path, or use something like “/run/media” to give it access to all user-mounted storage devices (this value may vary depending on how the disk is mounted)
Restart Steam (if it was running). You should be able to access additional devices.
I did that and so much more, and yet no dice. I just installed steam normally.
From my very non-scientific tests on an AMD 6800U device, running steam via Bazzite + distrobox gave me a 0-2fps boost versus running steam on uBlue Kinoite with Flatpak. Mangohud was slightly easier to manage with Bazzite’s distrobox setup. I did not test power consumption between the two for mobile gaming.
It seems to me that you’ll have to install the whole Bazzite distro to enjoy its goodies. If we’re only talking about running Steam, I’d just go with Flatpak for an easy start.
You can use bazzite in a distrobox container and get it running on any distro. I tried in Debian.
Flatpak is as good as native. I switched from native to flatpak with no perf differences
Debian schroot in a distro. Give the user in the schroot access to the snd device. Install Steam in the schroot. There, done. It’s even portable.
I have ran the flatpak version for a long time without any issues for games from Steam. How ever if you want to “add none Steam games to Steam” that are also flatpaks you need to add more permissions to the sandbox. You might want to do this in certain cases for example you want to utilize Steam Input for a flatpak game/emulator for better controller support.
