Michael Reed looks at what it takes to run a large variety of games under Steam, including those designed to run on Windows.

STEAM

Credit: https://store.steampowered.com

OUR EXPERT

Michael Reed used to think he was doing well if he could game in 2, 4 or 8 colours. It was all simpler back then..

If you’re at all interested in gaming on PCs, you’ve probably come across Steam, Valve’s platform for distributing, updating and running games. Steam makes it possible to purchase a game, install it over the internet and then run it from the Steam interface.

Ah, but that brings us back to the age-old Linux gaming conundrum of support, as not every PC game is designed to run on anything other than Microsoft Windows. That said, there are plenty of Steam games that will run on Linux, and quite often, a Windows Steam game can be convinced to run on Linux even though some ‘fettling’ by the user may be required. This approach is officially supported by Steam using a system called Proton.

Getting all of these things running, and then possibly optimising the results, is what we’ll be looking at in this tutorial.

1 Main menu

Easily overlooked, this is the menu bar. It’s mostly concerned with options to configure Steam itself.

2 Steam Sections

The tabs that take you to different parts of Steam. Each entry is also a pulldown menu if you hover over it.

3 Game library controls

Three filter icons to flick between: installed games, owned games and native Linux games.

4 Search

The search box. If you need this, you may have too many games!

5 Game library

The list of games in your library. Left-click to be taken to the game’s page. Right-click for the properties menu.

6 Run a game

A button that changes between play, install and stream functions.

7 Guilt-o-meter

Total play time. Keep this covered when your boss, partner or parents are present

THE STEAM INTERFACE

Steam powered

Steam itself is installed through a custom program called the Steam Installer. This makes sense because Steam updates itself and the games you install with it without relying on Linux’s own update systems. These days, the installer is in the official repositories of many Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora and their derivatives. As Steam is proprietary software you may have to enable a specific repository, such as ‘Multiverse’ for Ubuntu or ‘Nonfree’ on Fedora. Having done this, you can, for example, install Steam on Ubuntu as simply as typing sudo apt install steam-installer .

If you’re running a DEB-based distribution, but you can’t find the Steam installer in the official repositories, you can obtain the installer directly from the Steam website (steampowered.com) and install it with the usual dpkg -i [name of archive] as the super user.

There is also another, non-official, way of installing Steam that all Linux users might find interesting, and that is installation via the Flatpak system. This offers a few advantages of its own in terms of privacy and sandboxing, as Steam is a system unto itself once it’s on your system. A standard Steam installation is probably safe to use in the vast majority of cases, but if you are concerned (or if the other installation methods don’t work), give the Flatpak variant a look (search for ‘Steam’ on https://flathub.org).