Steam

You can use the gameonwhales/steam image to play Steam games on GOW. It’s highly recommended to use a GPU in order to run Steam games.

The Steam client and many Steam games are 32-bit applications and therefore require 32-bit drivers for your GPU. If the multilib drivers are not automatically installed on your host, please make sure you have installed both the 64-bit and the 32-bit drivers installed.

Here are a few frequently asked questions related to Steam support; if you run into any other issues, feel free to file an issue on GitHub or reach out in Discord.

Can Steam see my GPU?

You can look at Steam’s 'System Information' to verify that your GPU is detected.

UI: Why are all the Steam windows black?

Many parts of the Steam client’s UI are rendered using an integrated webview, which can be sensitive to the size of /dev/shm. You can check the size in your container like this:

$ docker exec -it gow-steam-1 df -h | grep shm

If it is at least 500MB, you may be experiencing a different issue. Check the logs at local_state/.steam/debian-installation/error.log for more info on the specific issue.

Can I run Windows games?

Surprisingly, you can! And it’s fairly easy to do it using proton which is integrated in Steam via Steam Play.

In order to enable it:

  • Steam > Settings - Steam Play

  • [✓] Enable Steam Play for supported titles

  • (optional) [✓] Enable Steam Play for all other titles

Something is wrong! Where are the logs?

There are a lot of different places for logs; for example, each game logs in a different folder. Here are a few hints on where to look

  • local_state/.steam/debian-installation/error.log

    This is where most of the issues with the Steam client are logged

  • local_state/.config/

    This is where games usually put log and config files. For example, local_state/.config/unity3d/NoBrakesGames/Human/Player.log is the log file for Human Fall Flat

  • local_state/Steam/logs/bootstrap_log.txt

    This is the log file related to starting/updating the steam client