Almost every distro I’ve used so far ends up having problems installing Steam due to mismatching i386 packages. I’ve heard that they’re being removed upstream. Anyone happen to know a timeline?
Almost every distro I’ve used so far ends up having problems installing Steam due to mismatching i386 packages. I’ve heard that they’re being removed upstream. Anyone happen to know a timeline?
Part of the problem is, sure, that installing an entire arch for a package touches up a lot of stuff… What I did was I set up a debootstrap schroot and added i386 arch to that so that neither they nor Steam touch my main system. Not only did I never have problems with Steam again, but I actually resumed pretty much from what I was when I got a new machine, simply by copying the schroot files over. Didn’t even have to install anything (but the schroot serve on my new system itself).
Have you tried our saviour nixos? Its pretty hot, was very very easy to install and configure.
Tried Nix once, I liked it but overall found it too complicated to setup and manage for the [counts fingers] three programs I was using it for. Might be worth the while if I need a larger library of programs from Outside, but so far Debian and AppImages have not failed me.
Quite the self contradiction
Its not just a much larger repo but also more fresh, additionally can be used on any distro really
This sounds like a good solution. Can you share how you did it?
I basically took the general idea from this Ubuntu doc and made som changes. After installing debootstrap, I followed these general steps:
adduser steam
./var/lib/chroot/steam64
.steam
as one of its allowed users.debootstrap --variant=buildd bionic /var/lib/chroot/steam64 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/
xhost +local:
.xnest
andxterm
; between their dependencies, they’ll take care of most of everything).steam
and fired up the Steam launcher manually.It’s not perfect, there are a few issues (in particular with audio) but once I had the installed schroot ready, I never had to worry about its 32-bit packages ever again. And that was back in… like, 2019 or something. Six months ago I copied to old schroot to my new machine and resumed playing, with no more cost than having to set up the schroot packages and the
steam
user (with the same old UID) on the new machine.Here’s a sample of the schroot profile file I’m using. The “steam64.local” is the profile directory, which is basically a copy of schroot/buildd (or of schroot/minbase) with some configurations in
fstab
andcopyfiles
to account for eg.: isolating /var/run and dbus, and giving the schroot access to the home directory for thesteam
user.