The GNU/Linux Diary

An excerpt from my my diary, from the 18th of February, 2024.

Be me, hear about how Steam is revolutionizing the availability of playable games on the GNU/Linux platform, install Steam. I figure getting the proper .deb over the Flatpak makes more sense, given all of my stuff is on an external drive, and maybe it would need to break sand-boxing in other ways to do emulation? I’m not sure, but may as well go for it just in case. Steam installs easy enough, and I check off a setting to utilize Proton experimental. However, literally just enabling this was a huge problem. You might think it’d just download and install, but actually no; it kept stalling in a manner which was literally unable to progress. I couldn’t uninstall it, couldn’t reset—couldn’t do anything at all. I tried killing Steam several times, but it just hung instantly on the install process at 56% when reloading. Tried clearing the cache and restarting; it retries and then fails to install, hanging at 56% again.

Okay great, isn’t installation pretty much just moving these files around anyway? It’s not as if it’s registry entries on Windows after all, so maybe I can just move whatever it’s frozen on? I figure out the Steam download directory and the correct ID—hardly difficult as it’s the only folder there—move everything, clear cache, kill Steam, and restart it. At this point I’m just begging for this thing to work. Steam starts up, it restarts everything, my face sinks, but then it fully installs. Thank heavens, it finally got itself working! Alright, maybe let’s try some random games...all of them fail for different reasons. Maybe I need to fully re-download them or something; these are directly off of my Windows install, after all. But whatever, let’s try some obvious stuff, like games made by Steam. Portal runs fine, Half Life too. Gary’s Mod? Yup, works. I’ll probably have to comb through it more, and figure out what does and doesn’t work at some point, but at least the program is installed and ready to be tinkered with, I guess.

Okay, how about a second Hail Mary since the first one worked: what about Steam VR? I’ve heard VR is an absolute nightmare to get working—and I’m not particularly big on VR anyway—but I have some hardware to try, so let’s see if anything works. I install it, run it, plug in my Vive Cosmos, and it’s sort of in limbo with missing drivers. Okay great, let’s get those drivers! Oh wait, just kidding, there are no drivers for GNU/Linux! Only thing that even came close was something called OpenHMD, which is a FOSS project with extremely limited functionality from several years ago, according to GitHub. Official Ubuntu site linked says...2016 release? I’ll probably have to come back to this. Also, I’ve got a fun new error here. Closing Steam VR leaves some remnant window with an unknown process I can’t terminate. Wonderful, guess I’ll have to restart if I want that black window box gone; thankfully it takes literal seconds to reboot Pop!_OS. Figure I may as well try my old headset too, my first gen Oculus before it got bought out by Meta. That doesn’t even get detected as missing drivers, it’s just nothing. Ah well, VR is not a deal breaker.

Perhaps I should take a break and look at some art, maybe save some stuff to—wait. I can’t drag and drop in my operating system‽ I haven’t made any sort of modifications to my browser or file browsing environment, so I find it extremely unlikely this is on me. Apparently I’m not the only one with this issue, but it seems to come down to the current desktop environment, which I’d have to modify in order to resolve. Kind of annoying, and I don’t really want to modify the system much, as I am still very new to it in general. I can still save images just fine, so I suppose I can spare the several extra seconds of detour for now. Hopefully an update will resolve this in the future, and maybe I could reach out on proper channels about it if it persists.

All writing is licensed under CC-BY-ND with attribution to Foxfire. The FSF recommends this license for opinion pieces.