Installing steamtinkerlaunch On Debian 12

Preamble

After manually installing the latest NVIDIA driver I was curious about the gaming performance of my new system. Sure enough, it worked like a charm! But there’s always room for improvement! Coming from Windows, some users may miss the convenience of mod managers, reshades or customizations. Well I have good news for migrants to penguin land! A lot of those tools are also accessible on Linux! One such utility is known as steamtinkerlaunch, a wrapper for easy configuration of game tools. If you’re on the Steam Deck or Arch based distros, you’re lucky enough to have it packaged in the AUR. Having migrated to Debian 12, my choices were:

1. Go with a Flatpak install (easy, but requires Steam Flatpak)
2. use Protonup-Qt (medium – still involves installing dependencies)
3. build from source (hard – lots of custom installs)

I chose option 3 and documented the process for future reference.

Installing Dependencies

The following guide is based on the the instructions from the steamtinkerlaunch and yad github pages but slightly modified for Debian. If you get an error saying a package couldn’t be found, it’s likely that the version names may have changed since publication. Use apt searchapt search , apt-cache searchapt-cache search , Google, or refer to official documentation to find the correct package names.

Hard Dependencies

sudo apt -y install bash git make gawk x11-utils unzip xdotool wget procps xxd  

Manually install yad

• Install build dependencies

sudo apt -y install automake intltool libgtk-3-dev
# optional but nice to have
sudo apt -y install libwebkitgtk-6.0-dev # for supporting HTML dialog
sudo apt -y install libgtksourceview-5-dev # enable syntax highlighting
sudo apt -y install libgspell-1-dev # enable spell check on text entry fields

• Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/v1cont/yad.git && cd yad-dialog-code 

• Generate Build Scripts

autoreconf -ivf && intltoolize

• Configure, Compile and Install

./configure
make
sudo make install

• Confirm installation worked with the yadyad command. You should see a dialog box pop up.

Optional Dependencies

You can choose to install these depending on the level of additional functionality you desire:

Install Optional Dependencies With Apt

Some apps are packaged with Debian and can be installed with apt.

sudo apt -y install jq winetricks gamemode gamescope gdb imagemagick libnotify4 mangohud mangoapp net-tools p7zip pev rsync scummvm strace usbutils vkbasalt xdg-utils

The last 4 that have to be installed manually are Boxtron, Nyrna, ReplaySorcery and vr-video-player

Install Boxtron

Boxtron is easily installed via Flatpak.

• Follow the instructions here to enable Flatpak.
• Install Boxtron with Flatpak

flatpak install -y flathub Boxtron

Install Nyrna

• Nyrna is also available through Flathub

flatpak install -y flathub codes.merritt.Nyrna

Install ReplaySorcery

Note – At this stage, hardware acceleration is not currently supported on NVIDIA cards which is required in Wayland.

Replay Sorcery can be built from source:

• Install dependecies

sudo apt -y install cmake ffmpeg libdrm-common pulseaudio xcb libx11-dev libavutil-dev libavformat-dev libavdevice-dev libavcodec-dev libavfilter-dev

• Clone repository

git clone https://github.com/matanui159/ReplaySorcery.git && cd ReplaySorcery

• Build from source

git submodule update --init
cmake -B bin -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
make -C bin
sudo make -C bin install

• Enable the service

systemctl --user enable --now replay-sorcery

• (optional) remove build directory

cd .. && sudo rm -r ReplaySorcery

vr-video-player – CURRENTLY UNABLE TO INSTALL

Based on the instructions, these commands should have worked:

# install dependencies
sudo apt -y install libcglm-dev libglew-dev libsdl2-dev libopenvr-dev libx11-dev libxcomposite-dev libxfixes-dev libmpv-dev libxdo-dev
# clone the repo
git clone https://repo.dec05eba.com/vr-video-player && cd vr-video-player
# run the build script
./build.sh

I received an error about libxdo.pc not being found in the pkg-config search path. I double checked libxdotool-dev was installed and added the output of pkg-config --variable pc_path pkg-configpkg-config --variable pc_path pkg-config to my PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variables with export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PKG_CONFIG_PATH:<output of previous command>export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PKG_CONFIG_PATH:<output of previous command> . I confirmed they were added with echo $PKG_CONFIG_PATHecho $PKG_CONFIG_PATH before running ./build.sh./build.sh again. No dice. Maybe the version of libxdo-dev packaged with Debian is too old? Either way, it’s not a feature I care for so I’ll skip it. Leave a comment if you know why. I may amend this section one day if I figure it out.

Install steamtinkerlaunch

Download the latest release from the github release page

• Navigate to your download folder and extract the source code

# Replace the version number with the version consistent with your download
cd ~/Downloads && tar -xf steamtinkerlaunch-12.12.tar.gz && cd steamtinkerlaunch-12.12

• build and install system wide

sudo make install

• run steamtinkerlaunch to generate config files

./steamtinkerlaunch

• update GTK Icons

gtk-update-icon-cache

• Add steamtinkerlaunch as a compatibility tool

steamtinkerlaunch compat add

• Restart Steam

Using steamtinkerlaunch

• For games that run under proton, right click the game in Steam and select force compatibility. Select “Steam Tinker Launch” from the compatibility menu.

• To set Steam Tinker Launch as the default compatibility tool, open Steam > Settings > Compatibility, tick the “Enable Steam Play For All Titles” checkbox and select “Steam Tinker Launch” from the “Run other titles with:” drop-down menu.

• For Linux native games, right click > properties: add steamtinkerlaunch %command%steamtinkerlaunch %command% to the launch options.

• Now when you launch a title you will have 2 seconds to click the main menu button to enter the tweaks page.

• You can increase this delay by clicking the GAME MENU button

• The default value is 2, but can be adjusted according to personal preference. I set mine to 5.

And from here you’re free to tinker ’til your heart’s content! Set a custom version of Proton, Enable common settings such as NVAPI for DLSS, Reflex and PhysX, enable ReShades, use Mod Managers, adjust performance overlays, whatever you want!

Be sure to consult the steamtinkerlaunch wiki for a more complete reference guide.