this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
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On KDE I couldn't get Steam to put my game library on my second harddrive. It would open up the file finder, then simply ignore whatever folder I picked (regardless of drive and folder permissions). I was able to recreate the issue on Gnome under wayland, but X11 works fine. I even tried making a symlink to the other drive in my home directory, no dice. Tried flatpak steam as well as valve's installer script; nada.
Interestingly, it seems that the "pick a folder" button in Steam opens up a contextual file search window in X, but just a regular nautilus instance in Wayland. I'd say that this is the problem (the regular nautilus/dolphin instance not reporting back to Steam what folder I selected), but it works for moving to different directories, just not drives (in both DEs). Same thing happened on Fedora, so it's not just "Debian is too outdated."
But let's be serious, if I wanted to spend a lot of time tweaking and tuning my graphical environment to be exactly what I want, I'm not settling for Gnome nor KDE. I'm not gonna go with Cinnamon, XFCE, LXQt, LMDE, MATE, nor any ecosystem. I'm going with a window manager and mixing and matching every single program/element myself.
I use i3 on my laptops. I would use Sway (because I don't have to care about Steam), but for some reason it's like 5x as resource hungry on these machines (constant freezes and stuttering).
Were you using the flatpak version of Steam?
What does any of this have to do with KDE, Gnome, or nautilus? If symlinks aren't working, I'd dedicate an entire drive to Steam by mounting that drive (with matching permissions) right where Steam expects to find them. You can mount a filesystem/disc/ISO/drive/network share practically anywhere you want. If your network is fast enough, I bet you could even access your games over NFS, though I wouldn't recommend it.
It doesn't matter where or how I mount the drive, the problem isn't the drive; idk how I could have made that clearer.
The problem only happens under KDE and Gnome on Wayland; the nautilus thing was just a curiosity. Did you read my comment?
Almost guaranteed a Flatpak thing. I know you said X11 versus Wayland was your issue, but likely some quirk of the two window managers was allowing it to work.
Adding the drive path in Flatseal or installing non-Flatpak Steam would likely fix it.
I'd be curious if using https://gist.github.com/davispuh/6600880 or configuration files for Steam that would be the kind of things fixed bypassing integration bugs in the UI. I didn't try as I didn't have that problem.