BakkesMod for (Arch) Linux and Steam Deck

TL;DR: AUR for steam, AUR for Heroic/Legendary

Supported Environments

There are two versions of the Rocket League: Steam and Epic Games Store (EGS). The EGS version is the only one available going forwards and support for that version is primarily built around the Heroic Launcher (GitHub). Heroic Launcher supports EGS games through a CLI tool called Legendary (which is why the AUR is called bakkesmod-legendary), but Heroic Launcher's settings will be updated as well if it's installed.

This guide is built for Arch or its derivative SteamOS, which runs on the Steam Deck. SteamOS requires some additional steps to enable modifying the game files, which will be covered below. If you already have an Arch Linux setup with yay, you can skip to the Platforms Section. This repo currently relies on Arch Linux's makepkg, but most of the installation logic is portable, so it's possible that other distros will be added in the future. In the meantime, you can find cross-platform instructions at CrumblyLiquid/BakkesLinux, or read the Bakkesmod issues thread for Linux.

Steam Deck

The SteamOS file system is read-only by default and is re-imaged on SteamOS upgrade. This means that you will have to repeat this process when Rocket League (and therefore BakkesMod) updates, if there has been a system update since you last installed it. Steam system updates will not affect the existing BakkesMod installation. There is an alternative method for the Steam Deck without some of these problems in the cross-platform instructions.

To start, switch to Desktop mode.

Install Heroic (EGS)

Open Discover (Flatpak GUI) Install Heroic To make the launcher accessable directly from gaming mode, open Steam's desktop interface Add Heroic as a Non-Steam game via the bottom left menu You may also want to check "Add games to Steam automatically" in settings to make the games more directly accessable.

Switch from Proton to Wine (EGS & bakkesmod on SteamOS)

This step can be done after running the command to install via yay, but the game has to have been downloaded and run at least once for the install to work. Proton-GE (Heroic's default) is currently unsupported, so, in Heroic, go to Wine Manager and download Wine-GE latest then switch Rocket League's Wine version to Wine-GE

Install Yay (BakkesMod)

Open Konsole. Don't do anything in this app with untrusted sources. tinyurl.com/yay-steam links to yay-steam.sh in this repo. TinyURLs are changable, so this is still bad practice. Enter and run the following:

curl -L tinyurl.com/yay-steam | sh

Platforms

In order to disable BakkesMod, set the BAKKES enviornment variable to 0. If you have the Steam version, continue reading. Otherwise, skip to the EGS section.

Steam

Install the package with

yay -S bakkesmod-steam

Then navigate to the Rocket League game's launch page

and select the gear icon > Properties

The setting that needs to be modified is Launch Options

The recommended Launch Options are

BAKKES=1 PROMPTLESS=1 %command%

My personal Launch Options on desktop are

BAKKES=1 PROMPTLESS=1 PROTON_LOG=1 WINEDEBUG=trace-unwind,warn+seh gamemoderun %command% -NoKeyboardUI -nomovie

EGS (Heroic/Legendary)

Install the package with

yay -S bakkesmod-legendary

Launching the game should now also launch BakkesMod, but to find the enviornment variable mentioned above, go to the settings icon on the upper right side of Rocket League's game page:

go to the advanced tab

and scroll down to the Environment Variables section

Disk recommendations

If you're running arch on desktop, LVM2 makes the filesystem management easier.