Steam Share Library With Linux

If you use Steam on Linux one of the annoying things I’ve found is that unlike on Windows, Steam for Linux installs to your $HOME directory. This means every user will have their own Steam installed and what’s more their own games installed. So on a shared system you might end up with the same games being installed multiple times.

Steam has a feature that allows you to install games to a alternate location called Steam Libraries. This feature allows you to create a Library at a new location such as an alternate harddrive or partition if you don’t like where Steam installs games by default. We can use this to create a shared library location of games. To do this create a new user group on my system called steam then add all the users on the system which use Steam to this group.

Then create a shared directory on my system called /steam-library, then set the permissions to allow reading, writing and executing files from this directory to anyone in the steam group.

Next launch Steam and add /steam-library as a new Library in Steam and installed games to this location. After installing the games you can tell all other users who use Steam on this computer to do the same. If a game they want to install is already in the Library, it’ll just appear in their account, no unnecessary downloading.

Quick Steps

mkdir /steam-library
groupadd steam
chgrp steam /steam-library
chmod 770 /steam-library
useradd -G steam your_user
# add /steam-library to steam on all pc's and user accounts