I just put together my first dedicated Linux machine. Running Pop!_OS, and I’ve got a problem with Steam. I’ve tried installing it from the Pop Shop (i love that name), both the .deb and flatpak versions as well as sudo apt install steam. In both cases, when I open the app it will just blink at me. Like the window is trying to maximize but then minimizes before it can get that far. I made sure that all my drivers look good and was just playing Starfield, so I know it’s at least somewhat functional. What’s weird is that it launched once for me. Long enough to get signed in. But after a reboot, it will not open unless I type steam --reset from terminal. Then it opens just fine and acts like nothing happened. Of course if I close that terminal window, Steam closes. And if I don’t do a reset, it will go right back to flashing at me again.

I’ve also noticed that games show “Cloud Status: Unable to sync” in the app. The following games are installed currently:

  • The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition
  • Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun
  • Starfield Premium edition All of these games show the cloud sync error. But when I checked the first two, the game save I had from my steam deck worked fine. But it still shows the error.

I tried opting into Beta to see if that might have some bleeding edge fix, nope. I’m still new to Linux and I’ll admit I’m not even sure where to look for Steam errors specifically to give more details.

Hardware (in case it helps):

  • AMD Ryzen 5 7600X
  • 32GB G.Skill Flare
  • Gigabyte B650i Aurous ITX
  • WD Black 1TB boot drive
  • Samsung Evo Plus 2TB storage
  • Cooler Master 850w gold SFX PSU
  • XFX 6700XT 12GB

Any ideas on what I can try? Or where I can find logs to better understand? I asked in the Linux Gaming sub…lemmy? at least about the cloud sync, but got no traction.

    • Father_RedbeardOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      Just tried and it’s the same thing. I don’t know why I didn’t think about Linux being any different when it was “closed” vs actually closed.

      • db2@sopuli.xyz
        2·
        1 year ago

        Is it still in your system tray when you close steam though? Mine doesn’t like to fully exit that way. If so then it isn’t exiting cleanly, you could have bad data getting read the next time you open it.

        • Father_RedbeardOP
          4·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, it was, but I clicked on it and Exited. Weirdly it seems really slow to reply to that exit command but it does eventually close.