GoXLR Utility on SteamOS

Due to SteamOS's immutable nature, some missing library headers, and the GoXLR Utility's current lack of flatpak support, getting the Utility working on SteamOS can be a bit of a nightmare. The good news is that the entire GoXLR Utility can be built and used entirely in user-space without the need to modify the underlying SteamOS system.

This does (unfortunately) require a bit of terminal work, and currently wont provide the GoXLR in Game Mode (that'll need extra instructions). I appreciate that it's not ideal, but not really avoidable at this point.

Prepare an Arch System Root

This step will download and prepare an archlinux bootstrap environment. This is needed as it includes headers and other development files which are missing from the standard SteamOS installation.

mkdir ~/arch-sysroot
curl -OL https://archive.archlinux.org/iso/2026.07.01/archlinux-bootstrap-x86_64.tar.zst
tar --zstd -xf archlinux-bootstrap-x86_64.tar.zst -C ~/arch-sysroot --strip-components=1 --no-same-owner root.x86_64/usr
export CFLAGS="--sysroot=$HOME/arch-sysroot"

Install The Rust Compiler

This will download and run rustup which can then install rust. When prompted, use the defaults for all options presented.

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
. "$HOME/.cargo/env" 

Build the GoXLR Utility

Similar to the compilation guides, when we get here we can just download the Utility source code from github and build it.

git clone https://github.com/goxlr-on-linux/goxlr-utility
cd goxlr-utility
cargo build --release

Grab Important files

This grabs the needed compiled files and moves them to the root of your home folder (in a directory called goxlr-bin)

mkdir ~/goxlr-bin
cp target/release/{goxlr-launcher,goxlr-daemon,goxlr-client,goxlr-defaults} ~/goxlr-bin/

Done.

From here, you should be able to (in dolphin, or another file mananger) naviagate to ~/goxlr-bin and double click on goxlr-launcher which will fire up the Utility and open the UI. If you go to System -> Utility Settings you can configure the Utility to auto-start on login, and pulling the UI up should be as simple as clicking the tray icon.

Bonus

If you'd like the UI wrapper app, you can download the .AppImage from here, put it into the ~/goxlr-bin directory, and just run it. It'll configure itself to replace the browser popup with the app popup.