I just built a new PC and decided to use Linux. Initially when I built it my ssd was going to take a long time to come in, weeks after the rest of the parts. So I installed fedora onto an external SSD that I had and everything was great.
Thursday my new internal SSD came in and so I installed fedora onto it and migrated the files I wanted to keep to my new one. After installing steam I’m getting errors when it launches.
There are several versions, proton hot fix, steam, runtime 1.0 scout, runtime 2.0 soldier, runtime 3.0 sniper.
No matter which one I launch this time around I get “an error occurred while launching this game: invalid game configuration”
Usually I launch it, the icon pops up and goes away several times, I end the process, launch it again and it gives me the aforementioned error.
It didn’t do that till I installed the new SSD.
Sounds like a permission problem from migrating files over, run steam from terminal to see precise errors.
I reinstalled steam from scratch, I just only migrated files that I was working on for other things
If you copied over your home user folder there may be some permission issues in the hidden directories where apps store their settings. If you suspect anything in your user directory might be an issue test creating and logging in with a new user account and see if everything works there.
What happens when you start steam from a terminal, --> /usr/bin/steam
What are the errors that your getting?
Did you change ownership of the files you moved from your old storage device to a new user you setup on second install.
ls -la from your home directory and make sure that the third and fourth entries from the output match the user you have set up. They should be the same output as what echo $USER gives.
The output should look something like this
drwxr-xr-x 1 **user** **user** 13 Apr 13 2024 .
The bold bits should match your echo $USER output.
If they don’t match your user you can use chown
To take ownership of those files you moved.
chown $USER:$USER **file**
There might be many files to take ownership of and it might be worth chowning your home directory recursively.
cd ~ && chown -R $USER:$USER .
None actually booted just fine.
How can I get it to do that while clicking an icon haha
First do the games launch normally without error? If you have errors you might need to do the chown thing if you users are mixed up.
if everything is working fine you can use locate to find where you OS keeps steams .desktop files:
locate 'steam.desktop'
on my machine they are :
/usr/lib/steam/steam.desktop
/usr/share/applications/steam.desktop
so since both the desktop files are in a root directory we have to change it with root privilege.
sudo nano /usr/lib/steam/steam.desktop
will open the file in nano. Look for an entry that looks like Exec=/usr/bin/steam-runtime %U and change that to Exec=/usr/bin/steam. To save it [Crtl] + o and then [Ctrl] + m to save, then [Ctrl] + x should exit nano. You might want to back up those files before you edit them so you have something to go back to if something goes wrong.
sudo cp /usr/lib/steam/steam.desktop /usr/lib/steam/steam.desktop.bak
sudo cp /usr/share/applications/steam.desktop /usr/share/applications/steam.desktop.bak
here is a cheat sheet for nano
Lets first make sure that your USERS aren’t messing with steam.
Have you installed Steam as a Flatpak? In that case, maybe it tries to read the file system on the SSD, but has no permission to access it/its mount point
