How to install steam on Debian 10 (Buster)

Note: console commands are listed as bold and italic.

Ensure that contrib and non-free are added to your sources.list (/etc/apt/sources.list). I've provided an example of mine below:

deb http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/debian/ buster main contrib non-free
deb-src http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/debian/ buster main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security buster/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/debian-security buster/updates main contrib non-free

# buster-updates, previously known as 'volatile'
deb http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/debian/ buster-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/debian/ buster-updates main contrib non-free



update your apt cache with sudo apt update. If all goes well, you can install your non-free grapohics driver, which in my case is nVidia.

with sudo apt install nvidia-driver

Since the Steam client is a 32bit application we will also need to enable the i386 architecture in apt.

use dpkg --add-architecture i386 since we've made a change to apt, you'll need to update your apt cache again with sudo apt update.

Finally install the nvidia-driver-libs-i386 package with sudo apt install nvidia-driver-libs-i386.

You should end up with both the 64bit and 32bit nvidia libraries, which should look similar to this:

dpkg -l | grep nvidia-driver
ii  nvidia-driver                        418.74-1 amd64 NVIDIA metapackage
ii  nvidia-driver-bin                  418.74-1 amd64 NVIDIA driver support binaries
ii  nvidia-driver-libs:amd64     418.74-1 amd64 NVIDIA metapackage (OpenGL/GLX/EGL/GLES libraries)
ii  nvidia-driver-libs:i386         418.74-1 i386 NVIDIA metapackage (OpenGL/GLX/EGL/GLES libraries)
ii  nvidia-driver-libs-i386:i386 418.74-1 i386 NVIDIA metapackage (OpenGL/GLX/EGL/GLES 32-bit libraries)

Finally, we can install steam with sudo apt install steam.