Steam work on linux

Steam/Troubleshooting

Contents

Introduction

1. Make sure that you have followed Steam#Installation.
2. If the Steam client / a game is not starting and/or you have error message about a library, read #Steam runtime and see #Debugging shared libraries.
3. If the issue is related to networking, make sure that you have forwarded the required ports for Steam.
4. If the issue is about a game, consult Steam/Game-specific troubleshooting.

Relevant online resources

• Multimedia and Games / Arch Linux Forums
• ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux – Issue tracking for the Steam for Linux client
• Steam Community discussions of the game
• Steam Support FAQ

Steam runtime

Steam for Linux ships with its own set of libraries called the Steam runtime. By default Steam launches all Steam Applications within the runtime environment. The Steam runtime is located at

If you mix the Steam runtime libraries with system libraries you will run into binary incompatibility issues, see steam-for-linux issue #4768. Binary incompatibility can lead to the Steam client and games not starting (manifesting as a crash, as hanging or silently returning), audio issues and various other problems.

The steam package offers three ways to launch Steam:

• steam-runtime (alias steam ), which overrides runtime libraries known to cause problems via the LD_PRELOAD environment variable (see ld.so(8) ).
• steam-native , see #Steam native runtime
• /usr/lib/steam/steam , the default Steam launch script

As the Steam runtime libraries are older they can lack newer features, e.g. the OpenAL version of the Steam runtime lacks HRTF and surround71 support.

Steam native runtime

The steam-native script launches Steam with the STEAM_RUNTIME=0 environment variable making it ignore its runtime and only use system libraries.

The steam-native-runtime meta package depends on over 120 packages to pose a native replacement of the Steam runtime, some games may however still require additional packages. You can also use the Steam native runtime without steam-native-runtime by manually installing just the packages you need. See #Finding missing runtime libraries.

Debugging shared libraries

To see the shared libraries required by a program or a shared library run the ldd command on it, see ldd(1) . The LD_LIBRARY_PATH and LD_PRELOAD environment variables can alter which shared libraries are loaded, see ld.so(8) . To correctly debug a program or shared library it is therefore important that these environment variables in your debug environment match the environment you wish to debug.

If you figure out a missing library you can use pacman or pkgfile to search for packages that contain the missing library.

Finding missing game libraries

If a game fails to start, a possible reason is that it is missing required libraries. You can find out what libraries it requests by running ldd game_executable . game_executable is likely located somewhere in

/.steam/root/steamapps/common/ . Please note that most of these «missing» libraries are actually already included with Steam, and do not need to be installed globally.

Finding missing runtime libraries

If individual games or Steam itself is failing to launch when using steam-native you are probably missing libraries. To find the required libraries run:

Alternatively, run Steam with steam-runtime and use the following command to see which non-system libraries Steam is using (not all of these are part of the Steam runtime):

Debugging Steam

The Steam launcher redirects its stdout and stderr to /tmp/dumps/USER_stdout.txt . This means you do not have to run Steam from the command-line to see that output.

It is possible to debug Steam to gain more information which could be useful to find out why something does not work.

You can set DEBUGGER environment variable with one of gdb , cgdb , valgrind , callgrind , strace and then start steam .

For example with gdb

gdb will open, then type run which will start steam and once crash happens you can type backtrace to see call stack.

Runtime issues

Segmentation fault when disabling runtime

As per the bug report above, Steam crashes with the following error message when run with STEAM_RUNTIME=0 :

This happens because steamclient.so is linked to libudev.so.0 ( lib32-libudev0 AUR [broken link: package not found] ) which conflicts with libudev.so.1 ( lib32-systemd ).

A proposed workaround is to copy Steam’s packaged 32-bit versions of libusb and libgudev to /usr/lib32 :

Notice that the workaround is necessary because the bug affects systems with lib32-libgudev and lib32-libusb installed.

Alternatively it has been successful to prioritize the loading of the libudev.so.1 (see comment on the same issue):

‘GLBCXX_3.X.XX’ not found when using Bumblebee

This error is likely caused because Steam packages its own out of date libstdc++.so.6 . See #Finding missing runtime libraries about working around the bad library. See also steam-for-linux issue 3773.

Warning:_failed_to_init_SDL_thread_priority_manager:_SDL_not_found»>Steam>Warning: failed to init SDL thread priority manager: SDL not found

Solution: install the lib32-sdl2 package.

Game crashes immediately

Disabling the in-game Steam Overlay in the game properties might help.

And finally, if those do not work, you should check Steam’s output for any error from the game. You may encounter the following:

• munmap_chunk(): invalid pointer
• free(): invalid pointer

In these cases, try replacing the libsteam_api.so file from the problematic game with one of a game that works. This error usually happens for games that were not updated recently when Steam runtime is disabled. This error has been encountered with AYIM, Bastion and Monaco.

Game and Steam crashes after game start

If the following error is output:

moving the incompatible lib can be a workaround.

Version `CURL_OPENSSL_3` not found

This is because curl alone is not compatible with previous versions. You need to install the compatibility libraries:

One of the following messages may show up:

You need to install either libcurl-compat or lib32-libcurl-compat and link the compatibility library manually:

Steam webview/game browser not working in native runtime (Black screen)

Since the new Steam Friends UI update, the client webview is not working correctly with the native-runtime.

It can be solved preloading glib libraries; Those do not require libpcre and selinux to work.

Alternatively, you may create a symbolic link to the native Arch libpcre library.

Steam: An X Error occurred

When using an NVidia GPU and proprietary drivers, Steam may fail to start and (if run from the terminal) produce errors of the form:

If lib32-nvidia-utils is installed, ensure that the package version matches nvidia with

You may need to change which mirrors you are using to install the drivers if they do not match.

If you are using AMD, have enabled 10-bit color depth, and are having this problem. You will likely need to disable 10-bit color depth.

Another issue that causes this error message can be solved by removing the config.vdf file:

Audio issues

If the sections below do not address the issue, using the #Steam native runtime might help.

Configure PulseAudio

Games that explicitly depend on ALSA can break PulseAudio. Follow the directions for PulseAudio#ALSA to make these games use PulseAudio instead.

No audio or 756 Segmentation fault

First #Configure PulseAudio and see if that resolves the issue. If you do not have audio in the videos which play within the Steam client, it is possible that the ALSA libraries packaged with Steam are not working.

Attempting to playback a video within the steam client results in an error similar to:

A workaround is to rename or delete the alsa-lib folder and the libasound.so.* files. They can be found at:

An alternative workaround is to add the libasound.so.* library to the LD_PRELOAD environment variable:

If audio still will not work, adding the Pulseaudio-libs to the LD_PRELOAD variable may help:

Be advised that their names may change over time. If so, it is necessary to take a look in

and find the new libraries and their versions.

Bugs reports have been filed: #3376 and #3504

FMOD sound engine

The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.

The FMOD audio middleware package is a bit buggy, and as a result games using it may have sound problems.

It usually occurs when an unused sound device is used as default for ALSA. See Advanced Linux Sound Architecture#Set the default sound card.

Affected games: Hotline Miami, Hotline Miami 2, Transistor

PulseAudio & OpenAL: Audio streams cannot be moved between devices

If you use PulseAudio and cannot move an audio stream between sinks, it might be because recent OpenAL versions default to disallow audio streams from being moved. Try to add the following to your

Steam client issues

Cannot browse filesystem to add a library folder or library folder appears as empty

If the file chooser is empty when trying add a library folder, or if a previously set up folder now appears with 0 games installed, this can be the result of an incorrect timestamp on the root directory or in the library folder. Timestamps can be checked with stat:

If the timestamp is in the future, run

to reinitialize it to the current date, then re-run Steam.

Cannot add library folder because of missing execute permissions

If you add another Steam library folder on another drive, you might get the error message:

Make sure you are mounting the filesystem with the correct flags in your /etc/fstab , usually by adding exec to the list of mount parameter. The parameter must occur after any user or users parameter since these can imply noexec .

This error might also occur if your library folder does not contain a steamapps directory. Previous versions used SteamApps instead, so ensure the name is fully lowercase.

This error can also occur because of Steam runtime issues and may be fixed following the #Finding missing runtime libraries section or due to no space being left on the device. For debugging purposes it might be useful to run Steam from the console and observe the log.

Unusually slow download speed

If your Steam apps (games, software…) download speed through the client is unusually slow, but browsing the Steam store and streaming videos is unaffected, installing a DNS cache program, such as dnsmasq can help [1].

Something else that might help would be disabling IPv6. See [2] for more information.

«Needs to be online» error

This article or section needs expansion.

If the Steam launcher refuses to start and you get an error saying: «Fatal Error: Steam needs to be online to update» while you are online, then there might be issues with name resolving.

This may also be as simple as DNS resolution not correctly working and is not always obvious since modern browsers will user their own DNS servers. Follow Domain name resolution.

Steam may have issues if systemd-resolved is providing DNS resolution. Make sure lib32-systemd is present to resolve this.

If DNS resolution works but the Steam launcher still shows the same error message, enabling DNS caching e.g. via the «Name Service Caching Daemon», nscd.service , has shown to work around this issue.

It is unclear what exactly running nscd does to make it work again though. Please check the talk page for more info.

Steam forgets password

Steam for Linux has a bug which causes it to forget the password of some users.

As a workaround, after logging in to Steam, run

This will set the file’s immutable bit so Steam cannot modify, delete, or rename it and thus not log you out.

Preventing crash memory dumps

Every time Steam crashes, it writes a memory dump to /tmp/dumps/ . If Steam falls into a crash loop, the dump files can become quite large. When /tmp is mounted as tmpfs, memory and swap file can be consumed needlessly.

To prevent this, link /tmp/dumps/ to /dev/null :

Or alternatively, create and modify permissions on /tmp/dumps . Then Steam will be unable to write dump files to the directory.

This also has the added benefit of Steam not uploading these dumps to Valve’s servers.

Steam license problem with playing videos

Steam uses Google’s Widevine DRM for some videos. If it is not installed you will get the following error:

No context menu for joining/inviting friends

Since the new Steam Friends UI update, it may be the case that in the right-click menu the entries for «Join Game», «Invite to Game» and «View Game Info» are missing.

In order to fix this, it maybe be necessary to install lsof .

Slow and unresponsive user interface

If you experience extremely slow and sluggish performance when using the Steam client it might help to disable the Enable GPU accelerated rendering in web views option under the Interface tab in the Steam client settings.

The friends list can also cause this problem. Two workarounds are mentioned in https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/7245:

• Moving the friends list to another monitor [3].
• Disabling animated avatars. Open your friends list settings (click the gear in the top-right of the list). Set FRIENDS LIST > Enable Animated Avatars & Animated Avatar Frames in your Friends List and Chat > OFF[4].

Steam fails to start correctly

One troubleshooting step is to run

This can fix various issues that come with a broken install.

Missing taskbar menu

If clicking your steam taskbar icon does not give you a menu, it may be necessary to install the libappindicator-gtk2 and lib32-libappindicator-gtk2 packages and restart steam.

«Your browser does not support the minimum set of features required to watch this broadcast» error

If you get an error stating «Your browser does not support the minimum set of features required to watch this broadcast» when attempting to watch a stream/broadcast try the following two troubleshooting steps:

1. Navigate to Community -> Broadcasts. If the page displays «Updating Steam» wait a few minutes to see if the process completes and cancel it after a while in case it does not. Now test if you are able to watch broadcasts, e.g. by clicking on one of the ones display under Community -> Broadcasts.
2. Start a broadcast while in Big Picture mode (View -> Big Picture Mode). If a broadcast starts fine while in Big Picture mode check if it still works after switching back to the main interface.

Using system titlebar and frame

Currently steam client tries to manage its windows itself, but it does it improperly, see steam-for-linux#1040. As a workaround you can use steamwm project. Run steam like this: ./steamwm.cpp steam . Also the project provides a skin that removes unnative control buttons and frame, but leaves default skin decorations.

Steam Remote Play issues

Remote Play does not work from Arch Linux host to Arch Linux guest

Chances are you are missing lib32-libcanberra . Once you install that, it should work as expected.

With that, Steam should no longer crash when trying to launch a game through Remote Play.

Hardware decoding not available

Remote Play hardware decoding uses vaapi , but steam requires libva2_32bit , where as Arch defaults to 64bit.

As a basic set, this is libva and lib32-libva . Intel graphics users will also require both libva-intel-driver and lib32-libva-intel-driver .

For more information about vaapi see hardware video acceleration.

It may also be necessary to remove the steam runtime version of libva, in order to force it to use system libraries. The current library in use can be found by using:

If this shows locations in

/.local/Share/steam steam is still using its packaged version of libva. This can be rectified by deleting the libva library files at

/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libva* , so that steam falls back to the system libraries.

Big Picture Mode minimizes itself after losing focus

This can occur when you play a game via Remote Play or if you have a multi-monitor setup and move the mouse outside of BPM’s window. To prevent this, set the following environment variable and restart Steam

Other issues

Steam Library in NTFS partition

If your Steam library resides in NTFS partition it is probable that games residing there could not start.

The trouble is that Wine uses a colon in its $WINE_PREFIX/dosdevices folder, and NTFS seems to have trouble supporting this.

Workaround: move the ‘steamapps/common/Proton 3.7’ and ‘steamapps/compatdata’ to a non-NTFS drive, then create symbolic link in their original locations.

Wrong ELF class

If you see this message in Steam’s console output

you can safely ignore it. It is not really any error: Steam includes both 64- and 32-bit versions of some libraries and only one version will load successfully. This «error» is displayed even when Steam (and the in-game overlay) is working perfectly.

Multiple monitors setup

This article or section needs expansion.

A setup with multiple monitors may prevent games from starting. Try to disable all additional displays, and then run a game. You can enable them after the game successfully started.

Also you can try running Steam with this environment variable set:

Text is corrupt or missing

Before reading following, try install lib32-fontconfig , ttf-liberation and wqy-zenhei (for Asian characters), then restart Steam to see whether the problem is solved.

Installing steam-fonts AUR may work, but it also may lead to corrupt font rendering in steam, like chopped letter.

The Steam Support instructions for Windows seem to work on Linux also.

You can install them via the steam-fonts AUR package, or manually by downloading and installing SteamFonts.zip.

SetLocale(‘en_US.UTF-8’) fails at game startup or typing non-ASCII characters does not work in the Steam client

You need to generate the en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 locale. See Locale#Generating locales.

Missing libc

This could be due to a corrupt Steam executable. Check the output of:

Should ldd claim that it is not a dynamic executable, then Steam likely corrupted the binary during an update. The following should fix the issue:

If it does not, try to delete the

/.local/share/Steam/ directory and launch Steam again, telling it to reinstall itself.

This error message can also occur due to a bug in Steam which occurs when your $HOME directory ends in a slash (Valve GitHub issue 3730). This can be fixed by editing /etc/passwd and changing /home/ / to home/ , then logging out and in again. Afterwards, Steam should repair itself automatically.

Games do not launch on older Intel hardware

On older Intel hardware which does not support OpenGL 3, such as Intel GMA chips or Westmere CPUs, games may immediately crash when run. It appears as a gameoverlayrenderer.so error in /tmp/dumps/mobile_stdout.txt , but looking in /tmp/gameoverlayrenderer.log it shows a GLXBadFBConfig error.

This can be fixed, by forcing the game to use a later version of OpenGL than it wants. Add MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=3.1 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=140 to your launch options.

Mesa: Game does not launch, complaining about OpenGL version supported by the card

Some games are badly programmed, to use any OpenGL version above 3.0. With Mesa, an application has to request a specific core profile. If it does not make such a request, only OpenGL 3.0 and lower are available.

This can be fixed, by forcing the game to use a version of OpenGL it actually needs. Add MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.1 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=410 to your launch options.

2K games do not run on XFS partitions

This article or section needs expansion.

If you are running 2K games such as Civilization 5 on XFS partitions, then the game may not start or run properly due to how the game loads files as it starts. [6]

Steam controller not being detected correctly

Steam controller makes a game crash

Steam hangs on «Installing breakpad exception handler. «

You have an Nvidia GPU and Steam has the following output:

Then nothing else happens. Ensure you have the correct drivers installed as well as their 32-bit versions (the 64-bit and 32-bit variants have to have the same versions): see NVIDIA#Installation.

Killing standalone compositors when launching games

Further to this, utilising the %command% switch, you can kill standalone compositors (such as Xcompmgr or Compton) — which can cause lag and tearing in some games on some systems — and relaunch them after the game ends by adding the following to your game’s launch options.

Replace compton in the above command with whatever your compositor is. You can also add -options to %command% or compton , of course.

Steam will latch on to any processes launched after %command% and your Steam status will show as in game. So in this example, we run the compositor through nohup so it is not attached to Steam (it will keep running if you close Steam) and follow it with an ampersand so that the line of commands ends, clearing your Steam status.

Symbol lookup error using DRI3

Steam outputs this error and exits.

To work around this, run Steam with LIBGL_DRI3_DISABLE=1 , disabling DRI3 for Steam.

Launching games on Nvidia optimus laptops

To be able to play games which require using Nvidia GPU (for example, Hitman 2016) on optimus enabled laptop, you should start game with primusrun prefix in launch options. Otherwise, game will not work.

Right click the game in your steam library and select Properties > GENERAL > LAUNCH OPTIONS. Change options to

Running steam with primusrum used to work. While steam has changed some behavior that now running steam with primusrun would not have effect on launching games. As a result, you need to set launch options for each game (and you do NOT have to run steam with primusrun).

For primusrun, VSYNC is enabled by default it could result in a mouse input delay lag, slightly decrease performance and in-game FPS might be locked to a refresh rate of a monitor/display. In order to disable VSYNC for primusrun default value of option vblank_mode needs to be overridden by environment variable.

Same with optirun that uses primus as a bridge.

If that did not work try:

HiDPI

HiDPI support should work out of the box, although on some systems it is necessary to force it setting the GDK_SCALE= environment variable to set the desired scale factor.

Protocol support under KDE Plasma

If you are getting an error after running a game through web browser (or executing the link through xdg-open)

Go to System Settings -> Applications -> File Associations, add new, select inode group and name it vnd.kde.service.steam , then under Application Preference Order you have to add Steam. Apply changes, It should be working now.

The game crashes when using Steam Linux Runtime — Soldier

Since Proton 5.13 Steam uses the Steam Linux Runtime — Soldier by default. Some games crash when using it.

To bypass it, you can:

• Manually build a proton without the Steam Runtime, or install proton-nativeAUR
• Modify

Replace script with:

Games running with Proton 5.13+ have no Internet connectivity

If you are using systemd-resolved as your DNS resolver, ensure you have created the resolv.conf symlink as described in systemd-resolved#DNS.

The file should contain something similar to:

«could not determine 32/64 bit of java»

A forgotten install of the aur package linux-steam-integration caused this with at least one game. Early on there were conflicts between the system and the steam runtime versions of some libraries, and that aur package helped resolve some of them. It is unclear whether it’s still helpful, but uninstalling it resolved the above error message for Project Zomboid. The solution was discovered by noticing that running the «projectzomboid.sh» command from the command line worked, but switching the launch options to «sh -xc ‘echo %command%; declare -p'» showed Steam was trying to run the exact same command, but there were a lot of «lsi-«-prefixed libraries inserted in the preload and path.

Stuttering with Vulkan

If you notice a constant intense stutter every 1-2 seconds, there may be conflicts in your vsync settings. Manually configuring vsync in the parameters will possibly fix it.

Go to the game properties and configure it in Launch Options:

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