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ProtonUp Qt

Eamonn Rea edited this page Apr 27, 2024 · 3 revisions

ProtonUp-Qt is a graphical tool for managing Steam compatibility tools including SteamTinkerLaunch created by DavidoTek. It allows you to easily install, update and uninstall SteamTinkerLaunch with ease on the Linux desktop and on Steam Deck. It does not install SteamTinkerLaunch system-wide so no need for any root access.

Please report any issues you experience with SteamTinkerLaunch installed via ProtonUp-Qt to either the SteamTinkerLaunch issue or the ProtonUp-Qt issue, whichever you feel is the most relevant place to post your issue.

Features

ProtonUp-Qt does a lot of the heavy-lifting for you when installing SteamTinkerLaunch, giving you almost all of the features you would get by installing SteamTinkerLaunch from a package manager. Below is an overview of the key installation points.

  • Install SteamTinkerLaunch from stable or from Git.
  • Easy updating on desktop by simply downloading the new release - no need to uninstall the old version, it is replaced automatically.
  • Automatically adds SteamTinkerLaunch to your shell path so you can run SteamTinkerLaunch commands right away.
    • Currently supported shells are Bash, Zsh (including OhMyZsh), Ksh and Fish.
  • Automatically sets SteamTinkerLaunch as a compatibility tool in Steam, just remember to restart Steam for this change to take effect!
  • The appropriate translation will be selected based on your system locale if a translation in your language is available for SteamTinkerLaunch, if not it will fall back to English.
  • Clean uninstall of SteamTinkerLaunch, removing it from your system entirely including from shell path, with an option to keep your SteamTinkerLaunch configuration folder.
    • You might want to keep your config folder if you have mods installed!

There shouldn't be any real limitations of installing via ProtonUp-Qt

Installation

On SteamOS, ProtonUp-Qt will not check for missing dependencies as these are managed for you, so the check is not applicable.

Outside of SteamOS, ProtonUp-Qt should tell you if you are missing any of SteamTinkerLaunch's hard dependencies.

See the ProtonUp-Qt section of the Installation wiki for further installation details, but once you have the relevant hard dependencies it is simply as straightforward as installing SteamTinkerLaunch like any other compatibility tool. To install a Git release of SteamTinkerLaunch, make sure "Advanced Mode" is enabled in the About menu of ProtonUp-Qt.

Version Management

You can only install one version of SteamTinkerLaunch at any given time, this is true with and without ProtonUp-Qt (unless you set up a more complex manual installation yourself!) so to switch versions, simply press the "Add version" button in ProtonUp-Qt and install a new version of SteamTinkerLaunch. The old version will be automatically overwritten without compromising your configuration folder.

You are still free to uninstall SteamTinkerLaunch, and you will be asked when you uninstall whether or not you wish to remove your configuration folder as well, as there are cases when you may wish to keep it (for example, migrating configuration files to another device or preserving mods).

Launch Option (Native Games)

It is possible and in fact very easy to use SteamTinkerLaunch as a launch option when installed via ProtonUp-Qt. As SteamTinkerLaunch is always installed to the same path on Linux desktop and Steam Deck, regardless of platform you only have to add $HOME/stl/prefix/steamtinkerlaunch %command% to your launch option, and you can use SteamTinkerLaunch with your native Linux games.

Due to a limitation of Steam it is not possible to simply pass steamtinkerlaunch %command% to native games when installed via ProtonUp-Qt. This is because Steam does not see user-added variables to the path. This can be worked around by launching Steam from the command line, but this is not ideal and it is probably easier to just add the line above.

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