I'm running Fedora 44 with KDE Plasma 6.7.4 and installed Steam through RPM Fusion. The installation commands completed, but launching Steam from the terminal produces a long series of errors saying it cannot create or extract files under `/home/gio/.local/share/Steam`, followed by a failure to extract Steam's runtime archive.
The errors include messages such as `Cannot mkdir: Permission denied`, `Cannot open: No such file or directory`, and `Failed to extract bootstraplinux_ubuntu12_32.tar.xz`. I suspect something in the Steam directory may have been created as root, but I'm not sure how to check or repair the ownership and permissions safely. I'm still getting comfortable with terminal commands and would mainly like to get Steam working so I can play Stardew Valley online with my wife. What should I check and how can I fix it?
3 Answers
If the Steam directory is owned by root, change it back to your user with: `sudo chown -R gio:gio ~/.local/share/Steam`. After that, start Steam normally as `gio`, without `sudo`. The recursive option fixes ownership for the directory and everything already extracted inside it.
First test whether your account can write to its home directory by creating a small file there, for example with `touch ~/permission-test`, then remove it with `rm ~/permission-test`. You can inspect the Steam directory's ownership with `ls -ld ~/.local/share/Steam` and `ls -l ~/.local/share/Steam`. If the owner is `root`, Steam won't be able to unpack its files normally.
This usually means part of Steam's directory was created with `sudo`, so the files belong to root instead of your normal user. Check who owns `/home/gio/.local/share/Steam` and its contents. Steam needs to be able to write there as your regular account, not as root.
That seems to be the issue—the ownership check shows Steam is under root instead of my account. I'll correct the ownership rather than launching Steam with sudo.
Thanks—that gives me a straightforward way to test both write access and the directory owner.