[Unexpected behaviour] Steam locate try to list game from flatpak steam when it as been uninstalled instead of native steam

[Yato202010]

During the development of my app I wanted to add steam flatpak support but steamlocate suddenly stopped working after that test .
It appears that Steamlocate only check if the steam folder is present and not if the steam flatpak is installed which is a big problems in the case of migration from steam flatpak to native steam since it appears that the steam flatpak folder is not deleted upon uninstall.

[CosmicHorrorDev]

That is a bit of an unfortunate aspect of the current design. I think that my preferred way of handling it would be to move the flatpak logic under a separate constructor (e.g. a locate_flatpak()) instead of the current logic of looking for a flatpak dir and then falling back to looking for the regular system installation

It takes away the "Just works" aspect, but also makes things very clear in how everything works. Any thoughts @WilliamVenner ?

[WilliamVenner]

Is there a way be can detect if the Steam flatpak dir is the actual desired output?

[Yato202010]

why not checking if steam is installed and have a steam folder by checking if /var/lib/flatpak/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/ and $HOME/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam exist as a simple fix to not break any project depending on this crate and add locate_flatpak() in 2.0 ? since it's unlikely that a user have both flatpak and native steam installed at the same time

[WilliamVenner]

Yeah I'm not entirely sure of any use cases for a locate_flatpak() function. Would probably make more sense to just keep it simple unless there's something I'm missing.

Maybe we could do some abhorrent hack that compares the last modified time of each installation and chooses the most recent one if both are present. Cursed

[Yato202010]

Yeah I'm not sure for the locate_flatpak() either but I don't really see any seamless elegant solution that would fit in locate() but yeah comparing the 'age' of folder could work

[Gawdl3y]

Could you not potentially check with Flatpak on whether the Steam installation is still active or not? flatpak info com.valvesoftware.Steam will yield a successful response if it's installed.

[LuisMayo]

Hi

I've been recently checking this since my app uses this library and my users have complained about this error.

Aside from the error though, I've been further investigating this issue and as far as I think there is no reason why Linux users couldn't have both flatpak and native versions of Linux installed which certainly adds to the problem.

That's why I think than ideally in some capacity the library should be supporting this by returning an iterator/Array of all SteamDirs instead of just one. Specially relevant given than 2.0 is around the corner and API changes can still be discussed. Or at leas under a different method

Thanks!

[CosmicHorrorDev]

I agree that someone can have multiple valid steam installations (although I'd imagine that's exceedingly rare)

Considering it would be such a niche case I don't think it should have any impact on the existing API. It'd probably be offered through something like SteamDir::locate_many()

[LuisMayo]

Understandable, I'll work on it against the v2 branch