⚠SteamTinkerLaunch ProtonUp-Qt Support

[sonic2kk]

As of today, ProtonUp-Qt, a graphical tool for managing Steam (and Lutris) compatibility tools, has just merged full support for installing (and uninstalling!) SteamTinkerLaunch. It includes support for downloading from the latest Git master release and downloading the latest stable release. Git release download has to be enabled in the application's settings.

It features full Steam Deck support, meaning you can install SteamTinkerLaunch from a graphical interface on Steam Deck. Keep in mind when installing on Steam Deck, at the time of writing it seems to auto-update to the latest release.

ProtonUp-Qt will always install SteamTinkerLaunch to $HOME/stl/prefix, so that the installation location is mirrored on desktop and Steam Deck. If SteamTinkerLaunch is available in your language, it will be set based on your system's locale, with a fallback to English. No need to copy the language files yourself!

SteamTinkerLaunch will automatically be added to your shell's path as well, even on Steam Deck! This means you can run SteamTinkerLaunch commands by simply typing steamtinkerlaunch from anywhere. This is useful for running commands related to mod management and other commands, see steamtinkerlaunch help for a full list. Currently the tested shells are Bash, Zsh (including OhMyZsh), and Fish, but Ksh should also be supported. If your shell is not supported, please leave a comment with your shell and how to add items to your path via that shell.

You can even use SteamTinkerLaunch as a launch option, however due to a limitation on Steam's side, it's a bit more work than just typing steamtinkerlaunch %command%. You will have to enter the full path to your script, but fortunately it is always at the same location, so you can type $HOME/stl/prefix/steamtinkerlaunch %command% and it will work as a launch option (including on Steam Deck)! If you launch Steam from a shell with SteamTinkerLaunch in its path, then you actually can use SteamTinkerLaunch with the traditional steamtinkerlaunch %command%.

If you've used ProtonUp-Qt before on desktop, updating SteamTinkerLaunch works a little differently from what you might expect with Proton versions. You don't have to uninstall SteamTinkerLaunch to update it. Simply download a new version and the old version will be overwritten.

However if you wish to uninstall SteamTinkerLaunch, it will ask if you want to remove your $HOME/.config/steamtinkerlaunch folder. This folder contains information about how your games are configured and also, crucially, may contain game mods, when using MO2 at least. You may not always want to remove this folder when uninstalling, so ProtonUp-Qt will ask you what you wish to do. When SteamTinkerLaunch is uninstalled it will remove the $HOME/stl folder and remove itself from your shell paths.

SteamTinkerLaunch support was a collaborative effort between myself, ProtonUp-Qt Maintainer DavidoTek, and Frostworx. Hopefully no major issues are found as a result of installing from ProtonUp-Qt specifically, but this issue exists to report any issues you might find. There is also a ProtonUp-Qt wiki page available for further documentation.

Happy tinkering everyone!

[sonic2kk]

There is also an open issue at DavidoTek/ProtonUp-Qt#86 (this is the upstream ProtonUp-Qt project) where you can report bugs as well!

[sonic2kk]

ProtonUp-Qt v2.7.5 features fixes and improvements to SteamTinkerLaunch support, including fixing some installation issues and allowing for managing installations of SteamTinkerLaunch external to ProtonUp-Qt. This should make migrating from manual non-root installs to ProtonUp-Qt much more straightforward!