Steam Play Beta. All Games are available for Download to Linux Steam Client

EVE Technology and Research Center Linux
19

I’ve now downloaded Steam for Linux and tested it myself. It works.

The steps I needed to do to get it working with Debian 10 “Buster” were these:

  1. Download Steam for Linux. You’ll get a file called steam_latest.deb.

  2. Install Steam. I’ve used dpkg -i steam_latest.deb in a root shell. Any missing dependecies such as curl or python need to be met before it will install. You’ll have to consult your distro on how to install .deb packages if you’re not familiar with it. Note: You’ll also need to have any i386-specific driver files install, such as for MESA, Vulkan and your graphics card.

  3. Run Steam. As I use Xfce4 was it only a matter of locating it in the menu under Games and selecting Steam.

  4. Connect to your Steam account and let Steam update itself.

  5. Open Steam Settings and select under Account the beta participation to get the latest software. Let Steam update itself again.
    image

  6. Open Steam Settings again and select under Steam Play to enable Steam Play for all titles. Steam will restart again. Here you can choose to use the latest Beta of Proton, too:
    SteamSettings

  7. Install EVE Online as you would normally do in your games library.

  8. Run EVE Online. It will briefly show the system tray icon of the launcher, but then quit quietly. This is due to the missing “Windows XP”-mode of Proton/WINE. However, this will have created a /tmp/proton_run file with a few details we need in the next step.

  9. Look at the content of the /tmp/proton_run file. It will tell you which WINEPREFIX the game was installed under and where to find Proton itself. For example:

$ cat /tmp/proton_run
...
	WINEPREFIX="/home/user/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/8500/pfx/" \
...
	"/home/user/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Proton 3.7/dist/bin//wine64" "${@:-${DEF_CMD[@]}}"
...

Note: The file /tmp/proton_run may or may not appear. It seems it no longer does for recent versions of Steam / Proton. If it doesn’t then see if you can find the directories on your own using the above as example.

  1. Start winecfg and change the compatibility mode to Windows XP:
$ export WINEPREFIX="/home/user/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/8500/pfx/"
$ "/home/user/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Proton 3.7/dist/bin/wine" winecfg
  1. Now you can try again to start the game with Steam. It should now open the EVE launcher and download the first game files. You can enter your account name and password. Once the last files have been downloaded can you start EVE.

Note that Proton 3.7 is based on WINE 3.7. For reasons unknown does it produce cracking sound for me. I don’t have this problem with WINE 3.15/DXVK 0.71. I suppose this may be a problem with Proton itself and could possible find a fix in the future. However the game runs with DX11 and all settings at high as expected. No winetricks were required for Debian. The Nvidia driver I’ve used was 396.54.02.

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