Introduction
Steam is easily the most popular PC gaming client available today. Installing it on Debian Stretch is very easy, especially considering Debian is the basis for Valve’s SteamOS. Steam is available in Stretch’s repositories, but there are a couple of steps that you need to take in order to ensure that it works right.
Before you do anything, make sure that you have your graphics drivers installed and up-to-date. It is also important that you have 32-bit support enabled. The Steam client for Linux only supports 32-bit, so it won’t work at all if you don’t.
Enable The Repos
Steam is proprietary, and the games it manages are too. As a result, you need to enable Debian’s non-free repository. To do so, open up /etc/apt/sources.list as root using your text editor of choice. At the end of the lines for the official Debian repositories add contrib non-free after main.
Next, you need to enable 32-bit support. That can be done by running the following linux command as root.
# dpkg --add-architecture i386
Once both of those things are done, use apt to update and upgrade your system.
# apt update && apt upgrade
Install Steam
Now that all of the work is out of the way, you can just use apt to install Steam.
# apt install steam
During the install process, you will be prompted to accept Steam’s license agreement. If you wish to continue, do so, and the software will complete its install.
Conclusion
That’s really all there is to it. You can now play your favorite games on Debian Stretch!