protonscr

Creating a shortcut silently fails when the desktop dir is unwritable.

steamopen
ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#12996 · opened 2026-03-17 by JThundley · updated 2026-03-17 · 0 comments · github
JJThundley 2026-03-17 github

Your system information

  • Steam client version (build number or date): 1773367340
  • Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): EndeavourOS
  • Opted into Steam client beta?: Yes
  • Have you checked for system updates?: Yes
  • Steam Logs: I grepped for this and saw nothing useful.
  • GPU: AMD

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

When your desktop is set to a location without write permissions and you request a shortcut to be created there, nothing happens.

Steps for reproducing this issue:

  1. Set your desktop to an unwritable location. This can be done in KDE's "locations" settings or by modifying ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs.
  2. Right-click a game in your library.
  3. Select Manage, Add desktop shortcut.
  4. Observe that nothing happens. No shortcut is made, no error is shown.

I don't use the desktop for file management, so I pointed it to somewhere in /efi so I wouldn't see icons on my desktop. Steam only wants to make shortcuts on the desktop and nowhere else this way. Ideally I'd like to ask it to make a shortcut in ~/.local/share/applications, but at the bare minimum it should show an error that it failed to create the shortcut. I went down a rabbit hole with this, I learned that Steam queries ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs every time it goes to make a shortcut. I ended up setting my desktop to my downloads dir and then configured KDE to show /dev/null as my desktop on each activity so I now have the best of both worlds. Steam creates shortcuts in my Downloads that I can then move.

Nothing extracted yet.