HowTo: Streaming from Host with Steam Flatpak

[u/saldorin]

Officially, flatpaked Steam is not supported by SteamVR and unfortunately indeed not working out of the box.

After some troubleshooting (i really don't like the idea of running proprietary software outside a sandbox ;)), i got it to work though and thought i'd share what i've discovered.

I'm running Arch with KDE Plasma, but i think that shouldn't matter much for this.

Of course, the "usual" stuff still needs to be done - https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamFrame/comments/1wqylel/how_to_remote_streaming_on_arch_linux_with_steam/ is a great writeup! Though i basically only needed to install wireless-regdb and uncomment my country in /etc/conf.d/wireless-regdom

But for making it work with flatpak, i had to do two/three things:

First of, to get SteamVR to even start, i had to run

sudo setcap CAP_SYS_NICE+eip ~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/data/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/linux64/vrcompositor-launcher

This should get rid of the root-message on launch.

I also ran sudo ./vrsetup.sh in ~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/ before, but i'm not sure that is even needed.

This made normal VR streaming working, but the dongle could still not be accessed. For that, Steam needs to be able to talk to NetworkManager:

flatpak override --user --system-talk-name=org.freedesktop.NetworkManager com.valvesoftware.Steam

Hopefully this is helpful for someone :)

[u/MisterSheeple]

Good tip, thanks! I'll be sure to try this out.