Steam Runtime Soldier and Proton Experimental are installed to the wrong location

[Mitsunee]

Your system information

• Steam client version (build number or date): latest as of today
• Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): Fedora 36 (seen the same on Kubuntu 19.04 to 21.10)
• Opted into Steam client beta?: No
• Have you checked for system updates?: Yes

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

Upon setting up my games library (/mnt/LAMBDA-Storage/Games/SteamLinux) on my NTFS HDD and opening any game steam will attempt to install Steam Runtime Soldier as well as Proton Experimental as per Settings. The problem lies within it ignoring the default install location and for some reason attempting to install Soldier and Proton onto the NTFS HDD, which results in a broken install that will not work even after moving it and not even rm -rf common following by verifying the files fixes this issue.

Steps for reproducing this issue:

1. Add Library on NTFS drive
2. Attempt to launch game on that drive while runtimes/proton are not yet installed
3. It will download and install them to the same drive
4. Enjoy your broken install.

What I expected to happen:

• Steam should honor the default install location, which is still my EXT4 SSD
• Steam should avoid installing runtimes to NTFS drives even if that would be the default install location
• Likely that it would make sense to always install such things to the main system drive as per $HOME/.steam
• Runtimes should be uninstallable, dependency conflicts be dammned. Problems happen and preventing uninstallation makes troubleshooting harder as you cannot reinstall things. If a dependency is missing upon game starting steam should then use the usual prompt informing the user of a required download happening and ideally also ask where to install to.

[kisak-valve]

Hello @Mitsunee, this issue is already being tracked in various issue reports including #8274, ValveSoftware/steam-runtime#434, #8473, #7407.

My expectation is that game dependencies should get installed to the same Steam library folder as the game, but I personally don't have insight into how Steam makes that choice currently.

Closing in favor of the older issue reports.

[Mitsunee]

My expectation is that game dependencies should get installed to the same Steam library folder as the game, but I personally don't have insight into how Steam makes that choice currently.

Why would that be expected when it literally leads to broken installs? I had to delete the entire ~/.local/share/Steam directory and restart my install from scratch just to be able to chose to have Proton and Runtimes go to the correct drive (that I had already selected as the default install location prior to attempting to launch a game)