steamos-fg

What is this for?

When using the SteamOS compositor, some games start behind the big picture UI and no graphics are displayed. This script forces such games to be shown in the foreground.

Affected games this script fixes include:

• Dead Cells
• Dirt Rally
• Civilization VI
• The Count Lucanor
• Mad Max
• Mirror's Edge (Steam Play)

Also games installed as snaps and flatpaks do share this fate and can be fixed by wrapping them with this script.

Why this fork?

This is an actively maintained fork of https://github.com/alkazar/steamos-fg.

Big thanks to alkazar for the original code.

Installation

Run the following command:

sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/oolongbrothers/steamos-fg/master/steamos-fg -o /usr/local/bin/steamos-fg && sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/steamos-fg

Usage

Steam games

Add steamos-fg %command% to the launch options for each game you wish to use this script with.

Games imported from desktop shortcuts

You can do this is by editing the .desktop files and prepending the command with the script path.

Example locations of .desktop files, here for Debian/Ubuntu:

Package format	system-wide	user
deb	/usr/share/applications/	${HOME}/.local/share/applications/
Snap	/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications	-
Flatpak	/var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications	${HOME}/.local/share/flatpak/exports/share/applications

There is a gotcha however: In its "Add Desktop Shortcut" GUI, Steam ignores all desktop shortcuts where the executable has steam in the filename (is is fine to have the string steam appear in the arguments though).

To fix this, create a link to steamos-fg with a different name:

ln -s /usr/local/bin/steamos-fg /usr/local/bin/gameros-fg

Then you can change those .desktop files by prepending /usr/local/bin/gameros-fg to the value of the Exec property:

Snap example:

Exec=/usr/local/bin/gameros-fg env BAMF_DESKTOP_FILE_HINT=/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/xyz.desktop /snap/bin/xyz %U

Flatpak example:

Exec=/usr/local/bin/gameros-fg /usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=xyz xyz

Notes

This script was tested on Ubuntu and but should work on SteamOS and Arch.

Package dependencies

Arch

On Arch, you will need these packages:

• xorg-xwininfo
• xorg-xprop
• xdotool
• procps-ng
• gawk

Ubuntu

On Ubuntu, you will need these packages:

• x11-utils
• xdotool
• procps
• gawk

Alternatives

Instead of this hack, you could fix the problems where they stem from, the steamos-compositor.

For a fixed version of steamos-compositor, have a look at steamos-compositor-plus, which is part of SteamOS alternative GamerOS by alkazar, the original author of steamos-fg.