CachyOS Announcement: Migrating away from steam-native-runtime

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:

14 Likes

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.

the version is proton native for cachyos

(post deleted by author)

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.

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