Good afternoon y’all.
I recently installed Steam on a laptop running a fresh install of Debian 12 & KDE Plasma. I’ve done this dance numerous times on other hardware however, this time when installing games through Steam they hang at 100% Downloaded & Installed and only complete when i pause them, one occasion two games simply wouldn’t install and took me a full day fighting with Steam to finish them and clear the queue.
Steam can’t seem to move files between drives (note: one drive is an SSD and the other is an HDD) or uninstall files and i assumed this was a permissions issue at first however, comparing the directory permissions from the laptop to my desktop (also running Debian 12 & KDE Plasma) i see nothing out of the ordinary.
Any suggestions are appreciated - Some things I’ve already tried.
- Purged steam from the system (including ~/.steam)
- Cleared ‘Download Cache’ in Steam settings
- chown & chmod (777) the common directories (~/.steam/steamapps/common)
- Waited numerous hours assuming the HDD was ridiculously slow - moving/deleting files in the CLi shell works without issue!
- Tried different download regions/countries
First, make sure you are using EXT4 file system on your drive, and it’s on /etc/fstab. Then you could see if mounting your HDD to your main steam library location on your home dir fixes the issue.
It’s always a good idea to check steam logs to get a better idea what could be going on.
The issue tracker is here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues
If you filter issues with keywords “external library”, you have 68 open issues to compare to yours. Eg. one is a shader pre-cache issue, disabling shader pre-cache may help. In another one people report needing to run a console command to mount the external library.
Hope this helps.