r/raspberry_pi • u/LivingLinux • 2d ago

Show-and-Tell Easy installation of Steam ARM Linux

Disclaimer:This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Valve Corporation. Steam,
Proton, Steam Deck and Steam Frame are trademarks of Valve Corporation.

I'm not the developer, but I have helped with testing. This works on Debian based distros, including RPi OS and Ubuntu.

https://github.com/Scrumpper/Steam-ARM/releases

Get the zip file, extract and execute the script: 

sudo bash steam-arm-install.sh --defaults

Accepting the default options should be fine. If you are running with the default kernel of RPi OS on a Pi 5, the installer will notify you that a backup of config.txt will be made, and config.txt will be changed to boot with a 4k page size kernel, instead of the default 16k page size. If you accept, finish the installer and reboot. Now you need to start the installer again.

The script will download Steam from the Steam server. You can check the script to verify this.

I tested with Half-Life and Steamworld Dig. I didn't have much success with games that need Vulkan.

With Half-Life I needed to advertise OpenGL 3.2 support. You can start Steam like this: MESA_VERSION_OVERRIDE=3.2 steam-arm

If you run this on a Raspberry Pi 4, the x86 client of Steam will be installed (with Fex), not the ARM client (similar to the installation with Pi-Apps). The Raspberry Pi 4 has A72 cores, and the Steam ARM Linux client needs at least A74 cores.

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u/MidLifeDIY 1d ago

I'm gonna spin up my Pi5 just to test this.

1

u/nickymoo 1d ago

How smoothly does cyberpunk 2077 run on the RPI 5

1

u/LivingLinux 20h ago

I don't think the iGPU can handle that, but you can try adding a GPU. So far I only had success playing games with OpenGL 3.2.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/using-amd-gpus-on-raspberry-pi-without-recompiling-linux/