GeForce NOW released for Steam Deck

Just an FYI that GeForce Now got a proper client for Steam deck, but don't bother trying on Zorin. (Not that many of you would, between justified displeasure with Nvidia and the subscription, but at least it doesn't try to resell you your games like Stadia did...) I gave it a shot and it's a flatpak, which is disqualifying enough for many here, but it doesn't run and gives a nondescript error. I tried running from console, which is how I discovered it's a flatpak, and checked the flatpak with flatseal--it looks to me like it's pretty tightly tailored to SteamOS, rather than being Linux ready and working on SteamOS.

I may be reading too much into it, but I base this on its permissions on the flatpak, which specifically want access to Pipewire (Zorin uses PulseAudio), Gamescope (available generally, but not included in Zorin by default), and a couple of other things that may or may not disqualify Zorin, but which I don't recognize. Environment variables call for Gamescope to try to use HDR (which Zorin can't as its version of GNOME doesn't support it), and look like they're trying to force Mesa to a specific Radeon driver, which may or may not be ok, but definitely wouldn't be on an Nvidia GPU.

So, as much as the GeForce Now app fails on Zorin, it's nice to see further acknowledgement of the Steam Deck as worth investment by major players in gaming.

...now if you'll excuse me, I need to go figure out how to remove a flatpak that was installed by a .bin. What the hell, Nvidia?

When it is a normal Flatpak, You should be able to uninstall it with a flatpak uninstall Command. Is it listed when You type flatpak list in the Terminal?

I think it's a bit more than a normal flatpak. In addition to a .desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications/ it put a non-.desktop file in there. The desktop file points to the non-.desktop, which in turn runs the flatpak command line. I think the .bin puts the non-.desktop file in for whatever reason. It also supposedly adds itself to your Steam Library when on a Steam Deck, which a flatpak would need specific directory privileges for, so I suspect that's done by the .bin as well, though it didn't work on my desktop (probably because my user isn't deck).

In any case, running the .bin a second time gave a "more options" button which allowed me to uninstall. Non-standard, but probably more comfortable for a Windows user who has a Steam Deck and no other Linux familiarity.

1 Like