SavvyWolf

A lot of people are saying to just “run steam in a command line”, but for 100% clarity, to do that you search for an application like “terminal” or “console”, then into that just type “steam” and press enter. It should launch steam whilst also writing debug info to the terminal. If you’re lucky, it’ll show some things that are googleable, just don’t worry too much about things marked as “warning”.

Another thing to check is that you have enough free disk space. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been trying to figure stuff out only for it to be broken because I ran out of space.

If your Distro provides Steam in its software centre and isn’t Ubuntu, prefer installing it from there. The Flatpak version of Steam is also fairly serviceable. Both of these will take care of installing dependencies and getting everything set up correctly.

I’ve not really needed it myself, but some people swear by Steam’s “verify integrity of game files” thing. But if you find yourself needing to do that frequently, back everything up since it can indicate hardware failure.

Thing is, unlike other vendor lockins, it’s on GOG and Epic for not providing a launcher. It’s super easy to install alternate launchers on the Steam Deck, it’s just Epic and GOG haven’t released official ones yet…

None, I use Nix instead. :P