Run Steam from console? (programming.dev)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by emotional_soup_88@programming.dev to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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I finally separated some overkill hardware from my server rig (an RTX 3080 and a Ryzen 5800X3D) and put them in their own chassi. Installed Arch, again, of course. The server got a "new" Ryzen 5700G , which apparently is a repurposed laptop APU.

A few years ago, I used to fire up my desktop environment (dwm on X11) and launch Steam from a pseudo terminal.

On my reborn gaming PC, could I skip installing a desktop environment and still play games on Steam? Will it run directly from the console like - for instance - mpv does?

The purpose would be to minimize any overhead from dwm and X11. Which sounds ridiculous now that I "say" it out loud, because it's negligible, but still. My question still stands.

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[-] nous@programming.dev 4 points 2 days ago

You cannot eliminate X11/wayland overhead. You need a display manager of some sort. I suspect most games/proton will require X11 or at least xwayland and a wayland compositor. You probably do want to use a window manager of some sort as well or you do lose out on a lot of controls like window placement and sizing. Some games might do weird things if they dont directly launch in full screen mode. And steam itself would probably want to be run in big picture mode to make it go full screen. If you want something designed for gaming then you might try gamescope which is what the steamdeck uses as its window manager in the game mode.

There are probably other areas with a higher impact that you can optimize more before really worrying about a lack of window manager though.

[-] emotional_soup_88@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago

Thanks for the input on screen sizing! I've never really had any performance issues with my setup, except for some weird stutter issues not hardware related:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3393460710

this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026

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