Does steam ui restart in the background while playing games for anybody else?

Lojcs@lemm.ee to Linux Gaming@lemmy.ml – 31 points –

First off I'm on wayland with Nvidia and I know that's a cardinal sin but I still wanted to see if anyone else is having the same problem. Simply, steam ui seems to crash or go unresponsive or something in the background while I'm playing games and then it relaunches itself and takes focus from the running game without pausing it. Also when playing with a controller sometimes the steam ui and overlay becomes unresponsive to controller input (and rarely mouse input too) so I need to use keyboard to navigate. Also today the game suddenly turned black and when I alt tabbed steam ui wasn't there so I launched it myself and then another one popped up on its own.

Is this a known issue? I found a resolved github issue saying steam crashes if you don't click on notifications, but for me it happens regardless of notifications. Should I create an new issue on github?

Edit for clarity and accuracy

11

It's not a cardinal sin, it's called being a brave pioneer :)

Anyway, fwiw I've noticed something similar where steam just (re)starts all of a sudden while playing. Like I notice the game gets sluggish, then focus changes to the steam client, complete with the "new offerings" sale popup that comes when starting steam. And I did have steam overlay UI freeze completely recently but restarting the game and steam fixed it.

Kubuntu 22.04, X11, nVidia 3060 with 525 driver

Nope, but I sometimes feel that the Steam client uses more resources than the games 🤨

No issues here (Wayland, Plasma, AMD). I’m not surprised that people are having this issue though, the Steam client is an absolute horrible mess.

FWIW, no such issues here with AMD + Fedora (Nobara) + KDE. Using the normal Steam btw (not the Flatpak) + Proton-GE and an 8Bitdo Ultimate Bluetooth controller.

Maybe try a different DE? Like if you're using Gnome, give KDE a try. Also, what's your distro, because that makes a huge difference - like Ubuntu and it's variants in particular aren't really ideal for gaming, if you're using one of those.

I'm on Pop and my Steam will randomly just restart sometimes. I have not found any rhyme or reason to it yet. And I'm NOT a linux expert by any sense of the word so not much I can do about it anyways.

I have plain ol' Ubuntu LTS and I do not recall a Steam crash in a decade. Playing with Nvidia GPU on AMD Ryzen in recent years.

not even on wayland but it still craps out constantly. goes partly or completely black, or just won't come back after being minimized. games take forever to shut down and even afterwsrds steam shows its running. some games suddenly refuse to start and exiting steam causes it to hang and i have to kill it from resource monitor...