Integration between Lutris and Steam both using flatpak

Posted Jun 14, 2026

By Jesús Adolfo Parra Parra

6 min read

I have installed Diablo II in my machine using Lutris, but I would like to see if I can add it to my Steam.

Lutris menu

Adding the shorcut into Steam

Lutris has an option just for that, but every time I tried it didn’t work Option to add a shortcut into Steam

I ran Lutris in the console with flatpak run net.lutris.Lutris to understand what was doing and showed me this:

2026-06-14 18:26:40,607: Creating Steam shortcut for Diablo II: Resurrected (wine)
2026-06-14 18:26:40,610: Failed to copy Diablo II: Resurrected (wine) icon asset to /home/adolfo/.local/share/Steam/userdata/1082768414/config/grid/2556130913_icon.jpg: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/home/adolfo/.var/app/net.lutris.Lutris/data/icons/hicolor/128x128/apps/lutris_diablo-2-ressurected.png'

So Lutris was doing something but still failing. I went to github and searched for "Creating Steam shortcut for", which is in this file. Now I can start debugging.

First, it seems to get something called vdf path throught "shortcut_path = get_shortcuts_vdf_path()", so I looked what is vdf in the context of Steam and it means Valve Data File

Ok, now it looks for the config_path with get_config_path() and that function just returns the config path for a Steam user

From what I can see I would say that this function get the userdatapath and an user_ids and returns it adding config to the path. So now I am interested on what get_user_data_dirs() is doing.

The comment for that function says Return the list of available Steam user config directories (using a SteamID32) and the base path where the settings are located (Returns the 1st location found) and the return type is tuple[str, list[str]]

This function uses a list of directories STEAM_DATA_DIRS for the search and it is defined as follows

STEAM_DATA_DIRS = (
    "~/.steam/debian-installation",
    "~/.steam",
    "~/.local/share/steam",
    "~/.local/share/Steam",
    "~/snap/steam/common/.local/share/Steam",
    "~/.steam/steam",
    "~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/data/steam",
    "~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/data/Steam",
    "/usr/share/steam",
    "/usr/local/share/steam",
)

I understand that it looks for different folders because it doesn’t know how Steam was installed.

Now I see what is happening, Lutris is choosing the path of Steam when I was using the Deb package (~/.local/share/Steam), instead of the newer flatpak’s installation (~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/data/Steam). I proved that really quickly:

        
adolfo@debian-desktop:~/.local/share/Steam/userdata/1082768414/config$ ls -l shortcuts.vdf 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 adolfo adolfo 787 Jun 14 18:26 shortcuts.vdf

The last time it was modified was today, meanwhile for the flatpak’s path:

        
adolfo@debian-desktop:~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/data/Steam/userdata/1082768414/config$ ls -l shortcuts.vdf 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 adolfo adolfo 13 Sep 19  2025 shortcuts.vdf

Reading the VDFs

But I wanted to go a little bit further, I wanted to see what it is inside. Thankfully I found a reddit thread for this

Be carefull with the code you download from internet, I checked the script before execute it just in case.

I create a vdf folder in /tmp
Put the two script from readsc.tar.zst in that folder
Run ./readsc.py /home/adolfo/.local/share/Steam/userdata/1082768414/config/shortcuts.vdf

And I got:

{
  "shortcuts": {
    "0": {
      "appid": 4006092820,
      "AppName": "Human resource Machine",
      "Exe": "\"/usr/bin/flatpak\"",
      "StartDir": "\"/home/adolfo\"",
      "icon": "/home/adolfo/.var/app/net.lutris.Lutris/data/icons/hicolor/128x128/apps/lutris_human-resource-machine.png",
      "LaunchOptions": "run net.lutris.Lutris lutris:rungameid/31",
      "IsHidden": 0,
      "AllowDesktopConfig": 1,
      "AllowOverlay": 1,
      "OpenVR": 0,
      "Devkit": 0,
      "DevkitOverrideAppID": 0,
      "LastPlayTime": 0
    },
    "1": {
      "appid": 2556130913,
      "AppName": "Diablo II: Resurrected",
      "Exe": "\"/usr/bin/flatpak\"",
      "StartDir": "\"/home/adolfo\"",
      "icon": "/home/adolfo/.var/app/net.lutris.Lutris/data/icons/hicolor/128x128/apps/lutris_diablo-2-ressurected.png",
      "LaunchOptions": "run net.lutris.Lutris lutris:rungameid/59",
      "IsHidden": 0,
      "AllowDesktopConfig": 1,
      "AllowOverlay": 1,
      "OpenVR": 0,
      "Devkit": 0,
      "DevkitOverrideAppID": 0,
      "LastPlayTime": 0
    }
  }
}

Which has Diablo II and Human Resource Machine, now I tried the same with the flatpak’s path and this is what I got:

{
  "shortcuts": {}
}

Fixing Lutris

Quick solution, removing that old path that I wasn’t using anymore and retry.

Verify twice the path before removing anything.

        
rm -rf .local/share/Steam/
rm -rf .steam # This directory had mainly symlinks to the former

Now it should work.

But it didn’t. I got an easy error this time:

[Errno 30] Read-only file system: '/home/adolfo/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/data/Steam/userdata/1082768414/config/shortcuts.vdf'

A quick search in Google points that this error is because the nature of flatpak (an isolated environment), but I can fix it granting additional permissions.

Let’s check first the current permissions:

        
      
flatpak info --show-permissions net.lutris.Lutris
[Context]
shared=network;ipc;
sockets=x11;wayland;pulseaudio;
devices=all;
features=devel;multiarch;per-app-dev-shm;
filesystems=home;/media;/run/media;~/.config/MangoHud:ro;xdg-run/gamescope-0:ro;~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam:ro;xdg-data/umu:create;
...

As I thought, lutris has access to Steam but only as read-only (that is the meaning of those “:ro”).

Grating access to specific filesystems to Lutris

I can grant access temporarily with flatpak run --filesystem=~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam net.lutris.Lutris. Let’s try again.

This time it worked without issue!,

/tmp/vdf/readsc/readsc.py shortcuts.vdf 
{
  "shortcuts": {
    "0": {
      "appid": 2556130913,
      "AppName": "Diablo II: Resurrected",
      "Exe": "\"/usr/bin/flatpak\"",
      "StartDir": "\"/home/adolfo\"",
      "icon": "/home/adolfo/.var/app/net.lutris.Lutris/data/icons/hicolor/128x128/apps/lutris_diablo-2-ressurected.png",
      "LaunchOptions": "run net.lutris.Lutris lutris:rungameid/59",
      "IsHidden": 0,
      "AllowDesktopConfig": 1,
      "AllowOverlay": 1,
      "OpenVR": 0,
      "Devkit": 0,
      "DevkitOverrideAppID": 0,
      "LastPlayTime": 0
    }
  }
}

Result

Now let’s check Steam and it’s there! (Lutris didn’t choose the best banner image but I don’t care) Now Steam has Diablo II

Real Test

When I clicked Play, nothing happened. So I launched Steam from the terminal with flatpak run com.valvesoftware.Steam to see if it prints something to the console.

I didn’t find anything interesting, but as I had problems with flatpak access just before this, I thought that maybe flatpak need something additional.

I googled launching flatpak from flatpak, and I was right, by default flatpak doesn’t allow that. It has an specific command to run programs outside the sandbox, flatpak-spawn

So I went to the Steam properties and modify the TARGET command it is calling from "/usr/bin/flatpak" to "flatpak-spawn --host flatpak".

The --host option allows us to launch an application outside the sandbox, directly on the host, but it requires access to flatpak D-Bus. We can give it temporarily in the same way I gave filesystem access.

This option is dangerous because it allows to run any executable in the context of the host, beating the objective of flatpak (isolation). Use it with caution.

I ran flatpak run --talk-name=org.freedesktop.Flatpak com.valvesoftware.Steam

Ok, it didn’t work, but after I modified the properties again it worked! it launched Battle.net

I moved the options to LAUNCHER OPTIONS With this properties it ran just fine

Finally: Diablo II menu

Managing Flatpak permissions

Searching how to manage flatpak permissions in an easy way I found two solutions

Using Flatseal
KDE has a module to manage flatpak permissions in the Settings.

I am going to show how to install the KDE module

Flatpak permissions management KCM

Install kde-config-flatpak

sudo aptitude install kde-config-flatpak

Profit !

This KDE module allows to modify the permissions easily

I tested modifying the Lutris access to the Steam folder and it worked.

        
      
flatpak info --show-permissions net.lutris.Lutris
[Context]
shared=network;ipc;
sockets=x11;wayland;pulseaudio;
devices=all;
features=devel;multiarch;per-app-dev-shm;
filesystems=home;/media;/run/media;~/.config/MangoHud:ro;xdg-run/gamescope-0:ro;~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam;xdg-data/umu:create;

Notice how it is not read-only anymore.

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