6d ago

Who needs stable, feature-rich desktops anyway

Context: https://pointieststick.com/2025/05/01/notes-from-the-graz-plasma-sprint/

247 comments

I've tried KDE on both Debian and Fedora. Neither have allowed me to do what I want to do: add a secondary storage device to my steam library. Whenever I try to, it just pops up a separate Dolphin window that doesn't affect steam once a folder is selected (almost like it's a separate process and not a child process of Steam).
The flatpak works, but 1. Ew; 2. It runs steam on Xwayland; 3. Being a debian nerd, I want to be as much of a
<default package manager>
purist as possible to make life easier down the road
I'll switch once this is fixed, but I just gotta stick with Gnome until it is
- add a secondary storage device to my steam library.
  You mean have more than one steam library? That's a steam setting. Nothing to do with KDE. Gnome, Debian or Fedora.
  The flatpak works,
  Oh. There's your issue. Don't run steam as a flatpak, there might be sandboxing issues.
  EDIT: MF did you read the page you downloaded stuff from:
  Note: To add a game library on another drive, first you need to grant the app access to it:
  flatpak override --user --filesystem=/path/to/your/Steam/Library com.valvesoftware.Steam
  
  Buddy... Flatpak works, I know that. I do not want to use flatpak. It's that Steam from the distro's official repository, whether it's on Debian or Fedora, doesn't allow me to set up a library specifically on a different storage device than the OS' and specifically only on KDE.
  
  Well, I'm using KDE and I set up a library eight months ago and... yes there's a bug. Just checked. Not entirely the same but related to this:
  https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/9797
  There's an official workaround mentioned there.
  I guess KDE updated their portal protocol version some time in between and steam got doubly confused. Probably not a KDE bug, in particular because this kind of stuff is happening for many, many portal implementations.
  And it's not a dolphin window (with me) btw it's a qt filepicker. Says "portal" at the end in the title, kde logo to the left.
- I have like five libraries, I went ahead and just tried to add another one to see if it was a regression and unfortunately I can't reproduce. Then again I've always been a KDE Arch user I don't know if that has anything to do with it maybe I just missed this bug
  
  I have the issue with debian also witj KDE, but I havent tried with Gnome, i did some searching and it seems to be a common issue among debian based distros
  
  I also had the issue on a fresh Fedora install, it's not just a Debian thing. I figured it was just the usual "debian packages are outdated, it's breaking things again" but unfortunately it appears to be something to do with KDE and non-Arch

247 comments