I'm running Fedora 44 with KDE Plasma 6.7.4 and installed Steam through RPM Fusion. When I launch it from the terminal, Steam fails while extracting its files into /home/gio/.local/share/Steam. The output repeatedly says "Permission denied" and ends with "Failed to extract ... bootstraplinux_ubuntu12_32.tar.xz, aborting installation."
It seems like Steam may not have permission to write to its own directory, possibly because some files or folders were created as root. I'm still learning Linux and would appreciate a straightforward way to check the ownership and permissions, then fix the installation so I can play Stardew Valley online with my wife. Everything else on the system is working normally.
2 Answers
The Steam directory is probably owned by root because Steam or one of its setup commands was run with sudo. Check the ownership with `ls -ld ~/.local/share/Steam` and `ls -l ~/.local/share/Steam`. Your user account should own the directory, not root. You can repair it with:
`sudo chown -R "$USER":"$USER" ~/.local/share/Steam`
After that, start Steam normally as your regular user—don’t launch it with sudo.
You can also test whether your account can write to its home directory by running `touch ~/permission-test && rm ~/permission-test`. If that works, your home directory is fine and the problem is limited to Steam’s folder. Check the owner of the Steam directory and its parent folders with `ls -ld ~/.local ~/.local/share ~/.local/share/Steam`. If any Steam files belong to root, correct their ownership before reinstalling or launching the client.
So I don’t need to create a full document—`touch` just creates a temporary empty file, and the second command removes it. That makes sense.
That appears to be the issue—the directory is showing root as the owner instead of my account. I’ll change the ownership and retry Steam without sudo.