This is a weird one but since I don’t have the time or insight necessary to troubleshoot Steam I will simply write how I perceive it. The longer you use Steam, the more it “rots” on disk and eventually breaks.

Steam on Linux

First of all, disclaimer, Steam and Proton are amazing! I came from the era of Linux gaming where we couldn’t even dream of playing what we do today. Konquest and nethack were my favorite games, another popular one was Tuxracer, because it was 3D! :O

So I definitely recognize what Valve have done, all hail Gabe.

but…

Steam on Linux is buggy

Let me document every weird thing that happens to my Steam from time of writing, 2024-07-10 and until I get tired of doing it.

Usually these are show stopping bugs that won’t let me run a game, or play it, and force me to reboot as a last resort.

2024-08-31: Won’t start

Here we go again.

flatpak run com.valvesoftware.Steam
...
/var/home/stemid/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/steam.sh: line 868:   135 Segmentation fault      (core dumped) "$STEAMROOT/$STEAMEXEPATH" "$@"                                                

Started after a system upgrade of both rpms and flatpaks. Rollback to previous ostree image allowed me to use Steam again.

Tried flatpak uninstall com.valvesoftware.Steam, also reinstalled ffmpeg and firefox. Tried another ostree update but it only resolved an issue with playing video in Firefox and Signal that was introduced at the same time.

Was so disheartened that I even tried using Lutris at this point, but it can’t install games from Steam, only import them from old disk files.

Resolution

Nothing had worked and I saw there was 1 package queued to be updated in Fedora, input library for Japanese. I have no idea why but after running rpm-ostree update one more time, and restarting, Steam worked.

2024-07-10: Steam just won’t start today

Yesterday I played two games, had no problems, today it just won’t start. After waiting for about 30 seconds I get a dialog asking me if I want to try restarting it without GPU support, but nothing works.

Resolution

One of the first things I always try is flatpak kill com.valvesoftware.Steam and start it again, this time it worked.

2024-07-10

A game won’t start anymore until I switch to Proton Experimental.

2024-07-08

Civilization V has its own launcher, and today my mouse cursor disappeared whenever it was over the launcher window, and I couldn’t click the launch button.

Resolution

In this case a system reboot was required, and usually when I feel like I’m out of ideas I also update all my flatpaks and my OS, but this time there was no update for Steam.

2024-07-25

Ostriv has worked for a week and suddenly it won’t start and I get the error “steamwebhelper, a critical Steam component, is not responding. The Steam UI will not be usable.”

Resolution

flatpak kill com.valvesoftware.Steam
flatpak run com.valvesoftware.Steam

The issues continued after one play session though, so I ended up having to do flatpak upgrade too.

Save files often out of sync

Not sure if this is an issue on Windows too but I’ve consistently had to wait for Steam cloud sync, or just ignore it and hope it resolves later. Definitely lost some saves to it once or twice.