Setting up Steam on Arch worth the time? Better use Ubuntu/SteamOS?

krork · 2015-01-10 00:07:51

Hi,
I'm just wondering whether I want to invest as much time as it seems to cost to get games running on a 64 bit machine with Steam on Arch.

Should I just grudgingly set up a Ubuntu/SteamOS install? Would that actually be a lot easier? Is that actually a thing now?

What's your experience? Is it very much pain on Arch?

WorMzy · 2015-01-10 00:18:10

pacman -S steam

is six characters less to type than

apt-get install steam

clfarron4 · 2015-01-10 00:40:10

Steam on Arch has worked better for me than Steam on Ubuntu and I was too lazy to try and hack SteamOS to boot without UEFI when it first came out.

Yes, you might need to find the odd lib32 library to get a game to run, but I've not had too much trouble with that.

And, I love this little gem which allows you go straight into Steam Big Picture Mode from a Display Manager

Last edited by clfarron4 (2015-01-10 00:40:52)

krork · 2015-01-10 09:54:25

WorMzy wrote:

pacman -S steam
is six characters less to type than
apt-get install steam

You are very right. I'm sorry, I guess, I just couldn't believe anything game-related would just -work- on linux. Last night when I posted this I had visions of having to compile a custom kernel, havoc with the graphics drivers and similar ghosts haunting me.. It's been almost ten years since I ran Warcraft III in wine and I guess I'm still traumatized from the experience.

I just installed steam and with it "the sigils of elohim" and it just -worked-. I'm seriously impressed right now.

wootsgoinon · 2015-01-10 17:06:33

"Last night when I posted this I had visions of having to compile a custom kernel, havoc with the graphics drivers and similar ghosts haunting me."

u must be confusing arch w/ gentoo

clfarron4 · 2015-01-10 17:12:36

wootsgoinon wrote:

"Last night when I posted this I had visions of having to compile a custom kernel, havoc with the graphics drivers and similar ghosts haunting me."
u must be confusing arch w/ gentoo

I dunno... Some of us over here do go through that... I at least have the custom kernels and sometimes induce havoc with my graphics card when I get bored.

Anyways, here's another point about Arch vs SteamOS: Arch ships with generally newer libraries than SteamOS so you might actually get some improvements over using SteamOS (which is Debian 7 based IIRC?).

fluffiey · 2015-01-14 12:43:17

clfarron4 wrote:

wootsgoinon wrote:
"Last night when I posted this I had visions of having to compile a custom kernel, havoc with the graphics drivers and similar ghosts haunting me."
u must be confusing arch w/ gentoo
I dunno... Some of us over here do go through that... I at least have the custom kernels and sometimes induce havoc with my graphics card when I get bored.
Anyways, here's another point about Arch vs SteamOS: Arch ships with generally newer libraries than SteamOS so you might actually get some improvements over using SteamOS (which is Debian 7 based IIRC?).

If I'm not mistaken, everything Steam-related is statically linked. They link against their own set of ubuntu derived libraries, so it doesn't matter if you're using Arch.

The games are also statically linked. Recently, I had to patch a library that shipped with a Steam game to fix an old bug.

Last edited by fluffiey (2015-01-14 12:55:23)

Awebb · 2015-01-14 13:01:38

I tried both. The only trouble I had was window manager related. You might also have slightly lower frame rates, because Arch uses upstream graphic packages and SteamOS uses a metric procreational ton of patches, that are not yet accepted upstream. I am quite satisfied with the results so far on Arch. You might run into some issues with tiling window managers and on occasion, the game expects a library to be present, that is there by default on SteamOS but not yet mentioned in the Arch package. A bug report will fix that.

nickleu · 2015-01-14 13:03:27

In my case steam and most of the game work just fine. I have tried out Left 4 dead 2, dota2, team fortress 2, half life 1&2, borderlands 2, CS:GO, CS, they all work fine
Goat simulator do NOT work, however. And I have no idea why:(

bleach · 2015-01-14 13:13:32

if you start steam in a console after a game does not work or has issues you can troubleshoot from its output, its ussually a missing library.

ANOKNUSA · 2015-01-14 17:53:56

Right, I guess I'll be "That Guy:" The only person who can really answer the OP's question is the OP, given the vagaries of personal hardware and software configurations. What works on my machine with my OS configuration may not work on the OP's. Besides, as Awebb mentioned, SteamOS is going to be carefully crafted to work in a particular way, while Arch leaves it all up to the user. All anyone can say---or has said so far---is that it works for them.

The Steam runtime is self-contained; if you're running a 64-bit system then the Arch wiki page on Steam can walk you through installation, which consists of Steam and its dependencies (managed by pacman) and the 32-bit package for your graphics driver. In almost all cases the libraries needed for the games to run, as well as the client itself, are installed to ~/.steam and ~/.local/share/Steam, and Steam handles its own updates without touching the rest of the system. Just install Steam on Arch and give it a go. If it turns out using SteamOS works better, then just follow the wiki page in reverse to uninstall the packages on Arch, and delete the aforementioned directories. It only takes a minute to remove all traces of Steam itself.

Games' data are another matter, though. Some save data to ~/.local/share/*, others to ~/.config/*, others to ~/.*, but every game I've played via Steam saves data to a directory with an obvious name (like the title of the game or name of the publisher).

Awebb · 2015-01-14 18:05:07

The clusterfuck that is game saves has bothered me so many times on Windows. Every tool and its mother seem to be under the impression, that it should write its stuff to My Documents, making this folder effectively useless as a folder for my documents.

klenamenis · 2015-01-19 08:58:40

I also struggled about instaling steam at first (arch 64-bit), but then gave it a go and it works absoloutely fine. The Wiki again provides beautiful help, tips and tricks. The only thing I had had to fix was this.

Of course, installation and actually playing games are two pair of shoes, but this totally depends on your GPU + driver + game constellation. I'm running on a R9-280X and always use the open source driver, which works perfectly fine (except for no fan control yet). The only reason I installed catalyst was "The Witcher 2", as radeon didn't support all the OpenGL features, but even this will change in hopefully near future.

Overall, I can honestly say that I'm having a very good gaming experience with steam on arch 64-bit, so you should really give it a try!

Edit: All Source based games ran even better with radeon than catalyst. DeadCore, Micron, Trine 2, War Thunder, Metro, The Bridge and Awesomenauts have been a pleasure to play so far, just for reference

EDIT: sorry, forgot it

Last edited by klenamenis (2015-01-19 14:42:34)

clfarron4 · 2015-01-19 09:33:47

klenamenis wrote:

I also struggled about instaling steam at first (arch 64-bit), but then gave it a go and it works absoloutely fine. The Wiki again provides beautiful help, tips and tricks. The only thing I had had to fix was this.

There's no link!

Arch Linux

#1 2015-01-10 00:07:51

Setting up Steam on Arch worth the time? Better use Ubuntu/SteamOS?

#2 2015-01-10 00:18:10

Re: Setting up Steam on Arch worth the time? Better use Ubuntu/SteamOS?

#3 2015-01-10 00:40:10

Re: Setting up Steam on Arch worth the time? Better use Ubuntu/SteamOS?

#4 2015-01-10 09:54:25

Re: Setting up Steam on Arch worth the time? Better use Ubuntu/SteamOS?

#5 2015-01-10 17:06:33

Re: Setting up Steam on Arch worth the time? Better use Ubuntu/SteamOS?

#6 2015-01-10 17:12:36

Re: Setting up Steam on Arch worth the time? Better use Ubuntu/SteamOS?

#7 2015-01-14 12:43:17

Re: Setting up Steam on Arch worth the time? Better use Ubuntu/SteamOS?

#8 2015-01-14 13:01:38

Re: Setting up Steam on Arch worth the time? Better use Ubuntu/SteamOS?

#9 2015-01-14 13:03:27

Re: Setting up Steam on Arch worth the time? Better use Ubuntu/SteamOS?

#10 2015-01-14 13:13:32

Re: Setting up Steam on Arch worth the time? Better use Ubuntu/SteamOS?

#11 2015-01-14 17:53:56

Re: Setting up Steam on Arch worth the time? Better use Ubuntu/SteamOS?

#12 2015-01-14 18:05:07

Re: Setting up Steam on Arch worth the time? Better use Ubuntu/SteamOS?

#13 2015-01-19 08:58:40

Re: Setting up Steam on Arch worth the time? Better use Ubuntu/SteamOS?

#14 2015-01-19 09:33:47

Re: Setting up Steam on Arch worth the time? Better use Ubuntu/SteamOS?

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