I’ve been successfully using Steam on my 64-bit Linux Mint Debian Edition desktop for the past month, and I thought I should make a small post about how I got it working and how well various games that I’ve tried work. I’ll try to keep this post updated as I try running more games.

Installing Steam on Debian

Installing Steam on 64-bit Debian is a bit of a pain. After trying and failing to get it to work myself, I followed aspensmonster’s instructions, which go over everything from setting up multiarch to modifying and rebuilding the steam package to fix the bugs in it. The guide has been updated fairly regularly as new versions of Steam for Linux came out, and should be more or less up-to-date.

This Debian install script may be helpful as well, but I haven’t had a chance to try it.

Games

Worked immediately	Required modification	Works, but with issues	Couldn’t get to work
Aquaria	Bastion	Dungeons of Dredmor	Team Fortress 2
Closure	Faster Than Light
Frozen Synapse
Gratuitous Space Battles
VVVVVV
World of Goo

Aquaria

Aquaria works perfectly from the start.

Bastion

At first, when launching Bastion I just got a black screen after the Supergiant logo appeared. This is a known issue with S3tc textures and I could fix it by opening /.steam/root//SteamApps/common/Bastion/Linux/run_steam.sh (your path may differ) and editing the ./Bastion.bin.x86 line to be force_s3tc_enable=true ./Bastion.bin.x86.

Closure

Closure works perfectly from the start.

Dungeons of Dredmor

Dungeons of Dredmor works, but suffers from fairly noticeable lag compared to its performance on Windows. It looks like this is a known Linux problem, but I haven’t been able to find a fix yet.

Faster Than Light

Faster Than Light crashed on startup at first, due to my open-source video driver. There are two possible solutions; I opted for the easy way out and simply deleted /.steam/root/SteamApps/common/FTL\ Faster\ Than\ Light/data/amd64/lib/libstdc++.so.6 (your path may differ). Faster Than Light now runs perfectly, and, surprisingly, is actually much faster under Steam Linux than the standalone Linux binary of FTL is.

Frozen Synapse

Frozen Synapse works perfectly from the start. There seems to be a bit of mouse lag, but it’s hardly noticeable.

Gratuitous Space Battles

Gratuitous Space Battles works perfectly from the start.

Team Fortress 2

I haven’t yet been able to get Team Fortress 2 to work. When I try to launch it, I get the error "Required OpenGL extension "GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc" is not supported. Please install S3TC texture support.". It looks like others have had this problem, but none of the fixes that I’ve seen mentioned work for me. However, I’m not an FPS fan, so I haven’t put very much time into trying to get TF2 to work.

VVVVVV

VVVVVV works perfectly from the start.

World of Goo

World of Goo works perfectly from the start.