Like the title says I am trying to understand how these things should work together. Part of my issue is I don’t have a good mental model on the Flatpak permissioning / sandbox model. My use case is running a game on Lutris, which is a Flatpack, and using my package install of Mangohud. I am also curious if I should using a Flatpak version of Mangohud instead of the package installed version, and understanding how I would set up Steam as a Flatpak in the future when I switch away from the packaged version.
Thanks for any helpful tips or links you can provide.
I don’t use flatpak but I didn’t have to configure Lutris or Steam in any way for that.
If you look around goverlay you’ll find that there are two ENVs that you can set up in X/wayland service to have MangoHud automatically in every context it can render in.
So first try running with
MANGOHUD=1env exported. If that doesn’t help, trymangohud steam.
If I understand correctly, flatpack run in some kind of container, so it’s possible that you might need to set the env or the command, so it happens inside the containerFlatpak apps don’t have access to your system packages, so you need to install mangohud as flatpak. Once it’s installed it’s available to Steam flatpak and can be enabled like system mangohud in system Steam.
https://github.com/flightlessmango/MangoHud?tab=readme-ov-file#flatpak
Edit: Switching from system Steam to flatpak Steam is simple and it’s always possible to switch between them. Just make sure to give flatpak Steam access to the existing SteamLibrary through flatseal.
Personally I have my SteamLibrary at ~/Games/SteamLibrary and give flatpak Lutris/Steam access to ~/Games.
Wait, you can change the location of the Steam library?
It’s possible to have Steam libraries at multiple locations.
I tried so hard to use the Steam Flatpak, but hit a wall when I wanted game libraries on multiple drives. The Arch wiki recommended to use the native binary.
