I use family sharing and want to use a different family members account on my Steam Machine in general, but when i use it would like my own account, how is the experience for user switching?

Does the same game need to be installed twice? Is it quick to switch or do you need to authenticate each time?

Anyone using their Steam Machine or Steam Deck like this? Family sharing or not.

  • Hexarei@beehaw.org
    3·
    14 hours ago

    I’ve run into a single issue that I found a note: if multiple people are playing the same game, and that game uses cloud saves, and writes saves to a specific place in the home folder, and that place is not scoped to your steam user, it’s possible to see and overwrite each other’s save games, which can result in your cloud saves getting stomped by each other.

  • anakin78z@lemmy.world
    5·
    1 day ago

    It’s great. We use family sharing, and everything is available.

    The only thing to look out for is that because it’s so easy to suspend games by just turning off the screen, I sometimes have to go: Who was playing stardew valley, and did you save? 😆

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
    9·
    2 days ago

    Personally great. We have 2 accounts on our (Bazzite but it is using the SteamOS) and it works perfectly. Launches into Steam and asks who is using it today. I have my own account, but can access my partner’s games as they’re in my family. Switching is quick, click user and then switch profile.

    Games do not need to be installed twice, there are some quirks though with a few games. Halo MCC had an error because it’s installed once, and it defaulted to my Microsoft account even though she was logged in via steam (makes sense when you think of it), so she had to log out of me and log into hers. Nothing horrible though, and very infrequent.

  • Creat@discuss.tchncs.de
    7·
    2 days ago

    One serious downside of mirror accounts is that the installed games in the library aren’t filtered to the current account (at least they weren’t last I checked). So if the accounts have different levels of purchasing activity, it’ll be a sea of not-your-games with some of yours sprinkled in between.

    You can somewhat mitigate that with different sorting options, but afaik there is no option at all to hide games unavailable or unowned on the current account.

    Functionally it works very well though.

    • HER0@beehaw.org
      1·
      10 hours ago

      You can somewhat mitigate that with different sorting options, but afaik there is no option at all to hide games unavailable or unowned on the current account.

      Does “ready to play” filter those out?

      • Creat@discuss.tchncs.de
        2·
        2 days ago

        Possibly, but if it isn’t enabled (like in my case) is a sea of useless, unplayable games with the playable ones hard to find in between. Truly annoying.

          • Creat@discuss.tchncs.de
            1·
            11 hours ago

            Yes, it is. But it doesn’t change anything in practice: we don’t play the same games. One has far more than the other (and more recent purchases). Enabling it just allows each of us to play the games we’re not interested in anyway, so what’s the point. It still leaves the ones we are is interested just sprinkled in between.

            Is not about not being able to play these games, but having no interest in them either. If they are playable or not makes zero difference. They are still in the way and just clutter.

  • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
    7·
    2 days ago

    You can have multiple accounts on a single deck. The switch is pretty quick, but you do need to auth in some way unless you set it to not require it. You do not need to install the same game multiple times. Essentially, if you’ve ever used the desktop client with multiple accounts, the functionality is very similar.