Latest Steam update broke it under Solus

Friedell

Since yesterdays steamclient update im not able to log in to Steam anymore.
It says the webhelper cant start.
Asked Steam and they just shrug their shoulders and say Solus isnt supported....

Up to the last Steamclient update it ran fine,in fact games ran even slightly better
than in Windoze.
So what now ? Im pretty new to Solus and frankly i havent a clue.
But i realy dont want to change to a "officialy" by Steam supported distro because i
like Solus Budgie.

Fiona_1986

Friedell May I ask, if and/or how you could solve the problem described? On github there is an open issue https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/10556 that exactly points to the symptoms many people encountered with their steam installation in the last couple of days. As a temporary workaround it is suggested "to move /usr/lib64/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3 out of the way on affected systems." but this seems rather harsh..Oo
It seems that GNU/Linux distributions with the 'glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3' directories are affected, Clear Linux is mentioned in the open github issue as well.

alfisya

This is steam problem https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen . There is flood of this issue reported on their github.

Friedell

alfisya Well,so far nothing has changed since my initial posting. And basicly it excludes all
CPU`s that doesnt support the AVX2 instruction set from using Steam under Solus (and many other distros).
And its only Steams own webhelper app that seems to need this instructions under Linux,because the same
hardware works perfectly fine under old Win7 to this day.

Harvey

Fiona_1986
I can only suggest checking if using the steam flatpak works around the issue.

Fiona_1986

Harvey Thanks for the reply, maybe I will check it out in a couple of days, since I am not around at the weekend. Usually I try to avoid the flatpak version of steam because for some reason few titles only playable with the Proton compatibility layer have problems with the Wayland communication protocol. That's not the case with the "native" steam client/installation provided by the package manager, at least that's what I experienced in the last couple of months.

Fiona_1986

Harvey After some tinkering around I can finally confirm that the updated flatpak version of the steam client runs flawlessly under Solus 4.5.

VTMarik

Fiona_1986 I can't seem to get it to launch a single game, do you have any specific settings in place?

SethStorm666

VTMarik

I'm using the Steam from the repositories, works fine here. Try run it via the terminal and see if anything useful shows up.

VTMarik

I figured my problem out, it was a problem with Steam not playing nicely with the NTFS drive that my games are installed to.

[deleted]

Are you using SSD or HDD? What are your specs?

The possible cause in some cases is too slow disk I/O:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/10581

Friedell

Well,since months nothing happenend with this issiue,despite several OS updates
i still get the same errormessage when trying to start Steam in Solus.
"Steamwebhelper not responding"

zmaint

Friedell I've not had any Steam issues with the repo version, but I'm using Plasma and Nvidia with X. Not sure if any of that makes any difference for your case. If you're using Nvidia, make sure to check the 32 bit library box in DoFlicky (hardware driver manager) when you install the driver or Steam will not launch.

Have you tried launching steam from terminal? Post the output here, that might help track down the issue.

Staudey

Friedell Yes, this has not been fixed yet in Steam. The issue is still open.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/10556

nolan

zmaint Solus uses the source that Valve provides (my guess), and the fix is not jet released (probably they are working on it) from Valve, I use Steam from flatpak and it works, I haven't used it from several day ago though, will try it wen I have time.

MikeK61

I`m also affected by this issue but what confuses me most is that steam still runs under Budgie.DE.

alfisya

MikeK61 on the same computer? Because this problem is hardware dependant. It only affects older PC CPU that miss some instruction set archictecture (ISA) that most of modern/newer CPU have.

MikeK61

alfisya

Yep, same computer and same Solus installation.
For some reason i have Plasma and Budgie.

nolan

MikeK61 For some reason i have Plasma and Budgie.

Friedell

From what ive read it has something to do with glibc-hwcaps and the way the steamsoftware
looks for certain libraries. Before the Steamupdate in late february all was fine because Steam
was able to find this libraries in Solus. After the update it only finds the V3 version and that
causes the steamwebhelper crash on older CPUs. In my case a FX8350.

[deleted]

Friedell You can work around that by using the unofficial Steam Flatpak.