Steam cannot update

Help
1

Everytime I open Steam I get a popup window that there is a new update for Steam. It is the same update though, so Steam does not update.

Is this “normal” on NixOS and I have to update Steam differently or is there something wrong?

System info:

  • system: "x86_64-linux"
  • host os: Linux 4.19.80, NixOS, 19.09.891.80b42e630b2 (Loris)
  • multi-user?: yes
  • sandbox: yes
  • version: nix-env (Nix) 2.3
  • channels(waynee95): ""
  • nixpkgs: /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos
1 Like
2

Lol, i was waiting for someone to raise an issue for me to merge the backport [19.09] steam: use 32bit version of libva by jonringer · Pull Request #73512 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub

1 Like
3

since it’s a buildFHSenv, I couldn’t verify if it was actually broken. Thanks for raising an issue

4

Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait for another evaluation to get the update through the release channel

5

Got the new update now.

@jonringer
But I am still not sure, if I understand it correctly.

Was this an issue with the nixos package of steam which caused steam to not update automatically OR with nixos, steam can ONLY get updated with an update of the nixos package.

6

steam on nixos runs in a “buildFHSUserEnv”, which means it’s given it’s own FHS-like environment to do what it wants. Steam will auto-update within this environment, and it’s stateful, so updates affects the environment.

The issue was that steam released an update where the steam executable will ensure that certain libraries are available, in a previous update they required libva.so, then in this update they required that it was a 32-bit .so. So then nixos needs to provide a FHS environment which has that requirement + others available. That is what the PR remedies.

Most steam updates are non-breaking and require no additional effort on nixos

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@jonringer
I see, thanks for clarification!