How to Install Steam on Arch Linux

Introduction

In this tutorial I will show you how to install Steam on freshly-installed Arch Linux with Gnome desktop. There are 3 main ways to install Steam on Arch:

• with pacman
• with Flatpak
• with Snap

Let’s dive in.

Install Steam with Pacman

Pacman is a default package manager utility in Arch linux, so it’s the best way to install software. Steam is available in multilib repository, which means that multilib should be enabled in pacman configuration file. Archlinux wiki has detailed instructions on how to do it.

To install Steam with pacman simply open a terminal and type:

sudo pacman -Syu

-S tells pacman that we want to update or install packages, -y asks pacman to refresh the package database and -u tells pacman to upgrade all out-of-date packages.

Unless your system up-to-date, you will probably see some updates available. Type y and press Enter to install them. After updating the system type

sudo pacman -S steam

You will see an output similar to this one. Type y and press Enter to install Steam with its dependencies and wait for the installation to finish. The output will be similar to this one

Now you can find and launch steam from the application menu. Here is a screenshot from Gnome desktop.

Install Steam with Flatpak

Check if Flatpak is installed

First, check if Flatpak is installed on your system. Open the terminal and type

flatpak --version

If Flatpak is installed you will see it’s version number. For example

Flatpak 1.12.7

If not, then the shell will give you this error

bash: flatpak: command not found

Install Flatpak

If you don’t have Flatpak, then update the packages / database first by typing

sudo pacman -Syu

and then install Flatpak with this command

sudo pacman -S flatpak

Check that Flatpak was installed by typing

flatpak --version

You should see its version number

Install Steam

Once you made sure that Flatpak is installed, you can install Steam by typing

flatpak install flathub com.valvesoftware.Steam

in the terminal. You will see this output

Looking for matches…
Required runtime for com.valvesoftware.Steam/x86_64/stable (runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/21.08) found in remote flathub
Do you want to install it? [Y/n]: 

Type y and press Enter. Flatpak will need to install a few dependencies as well. Just type y and press Enter when it asks for confirmation.

Now you can launch Steam from the application menu. You can also do it from the terminal, just type

flatpak run com.valvesoftware.Steam

Install Steam with Snap

While Flatpak usually comes with Gnome desktop, especially if you used the installer to install Arch linux, Snap doesn’t. This means that you will have to install it first.

First, update the system by typing

sudo pacman -Syu

After that check if you have git

git --version

If you get command not found error, install git by typing

sudo pacman -S git

Then type y and press Enter to confirm.

Once you have git, you can install Snap.

First, clone the snap repository on AUR

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/snapd.git

Then change the directory to snapd, build and install Snap.

cd snapd
makepkg -si

Press y to confirm.

Install Snap on Arch Linux

After the installation you will need to start the snap service. Type

sudo systemctl enable --now snapd.socket

Next, create a symlink to the binary file

sudo ln -s /var/lib/snapd/snap /snap

And finally, install Steam

sudo snap install steam --beta

Now you can launch steam from the application menu.