Steam on Linux notes

I did a silly thing. I decided to run Steam on CentOS 7. Steam was much simpler on Ubuntu, but I am foolish.

Getting it to run

I copied the steam tarball into my home folder, then extracted it into a folder called src. In order to run steam I bring up a terminal and execute ~/src/steam/steam.

One game I had trouble with was Portal 2. It seems that the 32-bit side of steam wasn’t able to find the 32-bit libraries. I added a file under /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ and called it local.conf

[john@pie]$ cat /etc/ld.so.conf.d/local.conf
/lib/i386-linux-gnu/

Fallout 4

Proton runs brilliantly for the supported games. Other games - like Fallout 4 - have certain challenges. One common theme here is to install winetricks so that you can obtain an ‘xact’ driver.
A github page describing some driver tweaks

There exists a user settings file at ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Proton 3.16/user_settings.py that allows you override wine default values. One use of the config file is to override the esync setting

After Fallout has run the first time it leaves a preferences folder in ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/377160/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/My Documents/My Games/Fallout4/. Inside this folder is an INI file Fallout4Prefs.ini where you can leave some Fallot-native parameters. One parameter is bComputeShaderDeferredTiledLighting=1 which will apparently solve some lighting issues.