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Anyone know of a way to remove Steam from Ubuntu 12.04? Looked around the net but could not find an straight forward solution. Thanks.

Organic Marble
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Hector Arzuaga Jr
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8 Answers8

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You can use Ubuntu Software Center to uninstall or Open Terminal and execute the following command:

sudo apt-get remove steam steam-launcher

Purge Steam Perfectly with Configuration files with the following:

sudo apt-get purge steam steam-launcher

Never forget to delete its directory and links located in the home folder:

rm -rf ~/.local/share/Steam && rm -rf ~/.steam*

If your downloaded games are located in a specific location, you have to delete those folders (which could be hidden in the home folder).

Younes
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KK Patel
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The .deb package is just a wrapper. Steam's launcher installs itself to ~/.local/share/Steam and can be over 1GiB so make sure you remove it.

sudo apt-get purge steam
sudo apt-get purge steam-launcher
cd ~/.local/share && rm -rf Steam
rm ~/.steampath
rm ~/.steampid

You may have only one of "steam" or "steam-launcher".

Bryce
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Michael Kanis
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    rm -rf ~/.local/share/Steam is correct but a tiny mistake--a space between ~ and / or between / and .--would result in every file in the home directory being deleted, including all the user's documents! Therefore, I recommend instead using: cd ~/.local/share && rm -rf Steam – Eliah Kagan Feb 15 '13 at 16:22
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    @EliahKagan Yes, but when u are using "tab" completion you will not have this kind of mistake. – Roman M. Koss Dec 24 '16 at 23:51
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    @RomanM.Kos I don't follow. When users make this mistake, I think it's almost always before they've typed enough characters for tab completion to be useful (whether or not they actually use tab completion). Replacing rm -rf with ls so it's safe and easy to test, typing ls ~ and then pressing tab displays a list of ~-shortened home directories (i.e., ~ followed by a username) for all user accounts, including those that don't correspond to a human user of the machine (like backup). More typing is required after this. – Eliah Kagan Dec 27 '16 at 15:37
  • @EliahKagan , missed this moment. i agree with you. – Roman M. Koss Dec 28 '16 at 11:07
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Removing Steam using the Ubuntu Software Centre:

  1. Open the Ubuntu Software Centre, by clicking on the appropriate icon in the launcher, or opening the dash and searching for it.

  2. Search for "Steam" in the Ubuntu Software Centre.

  3. Select it, and click "Remove"

This will remove Steam from your system. Only system files, however, will be removed, user files will not. For most programs, user files are very small and not worth worrying about, but for Steam, they include all your downloaded games, and can be quite large. To delete your user files:

  1. Open Nautilus, the default file explorer.

  2. Click "View", "Show Hidden Files", or press Ctrl-H.

  3. Navigate to .local/share/ and delete the steam folder.

Removing steam using the command-line:

You can do the equivalent of the previous steps in just two commands:

$ sudo apt-get remove steam
$ rm -r ~/.local/share/steam

In general, programs on Linux tend to keep user files in hidden directories in the home folder, either under .local/share, .config or .cache, or in a separate .PROGRAMNAME directory. Hidden files and directories always begin with a dot.

Flimm
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I had the same issue - installed with the .deb package from the website rather than using Terminal. I fixed by running:

sudo apt-get purge steam
cd ~/.local/share && rm -rf Steam

And then clicking on the menu and searching for the Steam app that was still present, right clicking it and selecting uninstall which removed the rest of the files. I hope this helps!

Nick Corin
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Open a terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+T). Then type: 

sudo apt-get remove steam
Eliah Kagan
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Glaive
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This is to complement any of the answers mentioned here regarding Steam installed via Software Center. If you happened to have installed Steam through Wine and wanted to uninstall it you can go to ~/.wine/dosdevices/c: or by typing the letter C in Dash.

In there you will find the Program Files folder which holds the Steam client. If you deleted Wine, this folder and any other install apps will still reside here. They are not gone even if you uninstall wine. You would have to delete them manually. On the other hand, if you still have Wine installed, typing wine uninstaller will get you to the Wine uninstaller, similar to the Windows "Add & Remove app".

You can also remove everything by simply rm -fr ~/.wine assuming you already uninstalled Wine and do not care about anything else in the Wine folder.

Luis Alvarado
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You uninstall Steam just as you would uninstall every other application. You search for it in Ubuntu Software Center and then you remove it.

If you also want to remove the data created by your Steam installation (like downloaded game files) there are two possible locations where Steam stores these files. One a directory called Steam directly in your home directory. The other is in the hidden directory .local/share/Steam in your home directory (you can view hidden files and directories by pressing CTRL+H).

Removing this directory means you will have to re-download your games when you decide to play them again. There is an option to backup your games from inside Steam.

mniess
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I've searched an other way to uninstall it if you have the package .deb. You do secundary click, select open with and choose Installer GDebi package, wait still that charge and after click uninstall all

user969591
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