Steam uses the removable-media plug, that should always give you access to things underneath /media and /mnt … so a plugged SD card with game data should just work when this plug is connected (use snap connections steam to verify)… for the other disks, either /mnt or a bind mount (note symlinks will not work) into your games folder should give you access…
Please do and let us know how you get on, I agree it’s a very common use-case and this is how my Windows gaming machine is setup. We have tried on separate drives on our side via the Steam settings UI and it seems to play well.
Something to keep in mind is the filesystem a separate game drive is using. A lot of folks coming from Windows have their dedicated game drives formatted as NTFS which can cause some issues with Steam on Linux (Deb and Snap). Steam will recognize the game files and even display the games in the user’s library, but they will often fail to launch. The fix is usually to adjust mount settings in /etc/fstab or format the drive into something a little more Linux friendly.
I’m using ext4 for all my game partitions. I’ve given it a try and it seem that with mount --bind I am able to get snapped steam to read and write into them. I’ll be trying out Steam in a snap from now on, until I hit some unsurmountable issue.
Found an issue just before going to sleep - I can’t use my xbox one controller. I’ll try to check what it says in a terminal. Also, for some reason, Overcooked 2 could not restore my progress. When running the same game from the same directory with .deb steam, it works.
I put in a github issue last week as I experienced the same problem with a wired 360 controller. In my case, it was related to uinput not being listed within the snap.yaml plugs list. Are you connecting the controller with a USB cable or via bluetooth?
While I was able to add the ones inside my $HOME, I can’t seem to add the ones in my other drives. I was able to add the ones inside my $HOME, but not anywhere else.
I have another drive, mounted inside /home/DATA, like my 870 EVO 4TB is on /home/DATA/870E4TB.
Any idea why I can’t add stuff in there now? I can still save stuff there with Firefox.
I tried to manually add by writing to the ~/snap/steam/common/.local/share/Steam/config/libraryfolders.vdf, but no dice.
Hope there’ll be a fix for this. Gonna use the apt version in the meantime…
My library is on a removable drive, and is working fine. I suspect your issue is the mount point, that path wouldn’t be allowed as part of the removable-media interface. If you changed your mount point to $HOME/DATA it would likely work.
Ok. I’ll move all of my external mounts to /media, creating mount points for each of my internal drives, and bind them on /home for snaps that somehow still doesn’t use removable-media permission (that was my workaround when Snaps first got started).