Skip Navigation

How do i add steam games to my Gnome desktop?

Using the add game to desktop shortcut dosen't work and only adds a broken badge and dosen't really add it to the system, plz help!! NEW TO LINUX!!!

26 comments
  • GNOME doesn't really care about shortcuts on the actual desktop, but you could put those gamename.desktop shortcuts Steam created into ~/.local/share/applications instead, and then they will appear alongside your Applications in GNOME.

    ~ represents your home directory, basically an alias for /home/username/ so you wouldn't have to type that in a terminal all the time. .local/ is a hidden folder (that's what the dot at the start does) and you might need to check if your file browser is showing hidden files and folders to see it.

    To get more in-depth help in the future, you should probably state what Linux distro (Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch...) you are using too, different distros can have different ways of doing things!

  • I don't know but you can just hit the windows key and start typing the name of the game. :)

    Gnome doesn't really encourage the use of icons on desktops...it's an old way of starting programs and not really needed.

  • Did this get sorted?

    • Nope just learned to cope with the issue like many things

      • I just tested on mine:

        Right click game in steam, add shortcut to desktop double-click shortcut, game runs.

        I checked the shortcut to see what the command is (right-click, properties):

        steam steam://rungameid/648800

        Is that what you have? The only thing I can think of is that steam isn't in your path, ie when you double click the shortcut it tries to run 'steam' but then can't find it.

        If you open a terminal and type:

        which steam

        what's your output? You should have something like /usr/bin/steam

26 comments