I think the simplest answer is that no, you can't at least easily run another instance of Steam via the Flatpak. The two instances would need to hit separate configuration folders and so on. I think what might be possible is creating basically a full-system container with a separate /home and installing Steam there. You would then need to pass the X11/Wayland connection and other such stuff into that container so you can get graphics working. I think Distrobox might be able to do it, or you can do it the hard way directly with Podman/Docker or systemd-nspawn, LXC etc.

It would be a very roundabout way, but I guess technically you could run the native Steam client, and at the same time, run the Windows Steam client in Wine...

I think the easiest way to run two Steam instances, would be to have 1 Steam intalled via Flatpak, and 1 Steam installed as a system package. It seems like it should work.

As to how to do it purely with Flatpak, no idea - I just thought I'd share a few cents in case you found it helpful.

Last edited by DoctorJunglist on 4 Feb 2026 at 4:30 pm UTC

I experimented a little with the native (non-Flatpak) client and simply setting up another home dir and a pretend username is enough to launch a second client - at least as far as the login prompt, I don't have a second account to test further with.

$ HOME=/home/whizse/seconduser USER=seconduser steam