CachyOS Announcement: Migrating away from steam-native-runtime

Announcements
1

CachyOS Announcement: Migrating away from steam-native-runtime

Why this change?
Arch Linux has removed compatibility with the Steam Native Runtime (steam-native-runtime). To ensure Steam continues to work reliably on CachyOS, we’re standardizing on Valve’s official Steam Runtime bundled with the steam package.

What you need to do (1–2 minutes)

  1. Update your system:
sudo pacman -Syu
  1. Remove the native runtime shim:
sudo pacman -Rsn steam-native-runtime

After that, Steam will automatically use Valve’s bundled runtime.

Note about “Remove orphans” in CachyOS-Hello

You can also use the Remove orphans button in CachyOS-Hello.
However: this may suggest removing 32-bit GPU drivers that Steam/Proton still need. Do not remove these if you use Steam.

Examples:

  • NVIDIA: lib32-nvidia-utils lib32-opencl-nvidia
  • AMD (Mesa): lib32-mesa, lib32-vulkan-radeon
  • Intel (Mesa): lib32-mesa, lib32-vulkan-intel

If you removed them accidentally, reinstall the appropriate packages:

# NVIDIA
sudo pacman -S lib32-nvidia-utils

# AMD (Mesa)
sudo pacman -S lib32-mesa lib32-vulkan-radeon

# Intel (Mesa)
sudo pacman -S lib32-mesa lib32-vulkan-intel

FAQ (quick)

  • Do I need to reinstall Steam? No—just remove steam-native-runtime.
  • Why are 32-bit drivers needed? Many games and parts of Proton still use 32-bit userland components.

Happy gaming! :video_game:

2

I still want use the native libraries, so I installed steam-native-runtime from the AUR. I’m not sure if it actually makes a difference if I use steam or steam-native, especially if I use proton-cachyos

It would be nice if the cachyos repo kept building these packages from the AUR, at least the dependencies for steam-native, it already has a lot of AUR packages, most of the time it just repackages binary packages, which makes no difference for the installed program.

3

the version is proton native for cachyos

5

Make sure to also delete the steam-native.desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications. It always got mixed up with the regular steam.desktop file, and opening up the regular one, would always open the steam-native one. And it still does, after uninstalling the Steam native runtime, so then there’s some trouble with pinning it. Pinning the regular one, will open up a seperate window with the native one, even after uninstalling the native runtime. So as I said, make sure to delete it. Then the regular steam.desktop file will open the regular Steam, instead of the native one.

6

EDIT: sorry, mixed something up. So we should also switch from proton-cachyos to proton-cachyos-slr?

7

i have a few questions. about the native libs that proton-cachyos uses, will it will still be using them or will it take over the job of the -slr variant? and somewhat off topic, is there an rss feed for (semi-)breaking news like this? the only reason i looked for this announcement is because these packages started being pulled from the aur since they no longer existed in-repo.

edit: ik arch has a rss feed, but with cachyos being a primarily gaming focused distro i feel like news like this should be as available as the arch news is.

8

+1 on this, is the native version now considered deprecated?

9

No it’s not deprecated, the steam-native command is just a shell script, setting a few environment variables and flags provided by valve:

It got removed from the official repos, because the arch maintainers decided they wanted to purge every gtk2 package, for some reason

Practically for older linux games SLR should be fine, SLR stands for Steam Linux Runtime (regular steam not the native one). You will use outdated libraries anyway, even if they were compiled differently for your distro,than the ones in SLR, it’s not going to make a big difference. Also, there aren’t many linux games, that were updated in recent years or they don’t even use modern libraries.

Theoretically, especially linux games that use fairly new libraries that still get new versions, could see some improvements by using the ones provided by the distro, even more with a distro like cachy. These “improvements” could end up being not much in the end or turn into regressions too. Maybe someone should do some benchmarks or something… Maybe there will be a few FPSs in plus or minus.

If I remember correctly native is required for some custom proton variants like ge and pronton-cachyos. That’s why we have proton-cachyos-slr.

I don’t know if there are performance improvements or compatibility issues in the non SLR proton-cachyos, but I use that in cachy and endeavour without issues. I just like the idea of using the optimized system libraries provide by cachy. That’s why I don’t use flatpaks & co, SLR is the same thing, a container.

I have reinstalled everything from the AUR, on both of my systems, they work well. The libraries that were removed from multilib are old anyway, so probably they won’t be updated anymore. It takes a few minutes to recompile them, but I think it will be a one time thing.

Might be nice if these packages were included in the cachy repos, since there are already a lot of AUR packages in the repos, without any added benefit.

10

Thanks for the info, I think the terminology threw us off more than anything. I did testing on a newer title, Silent Hill F, and noticed the SLR one stuttered like mad, way worse than the native, so a difference is there as you stated.

11

Good to know, I never use SLR. Since we are on cachyos we should try to use the optimized packages.

12

It’s not safe to do.

This command tries to remove more than just steam-native-runtime.

Idk why, it’s not safe.

13

Care to elaborate why that is not safe? I do it all the time since I use cachy-update.

14

There’s no guarantee. What works to you maybe works differently to others. Or some issues you do not want to encounter after messing with your system.

15

If we operated our computers on nothing but guarantees we’d never plug them in. That’s the only way to be truly sure that nothing is going to go wrong. And even then…

Removing orphans is perfectly fine to do. There’s a reason the operation is included in running arch-update/cachy-update and why there’s a button for it right in CachyOS Hello.