Steam causing repeated Logout/suspend on Ubuntu 20.04

[*****]

When I start Steam in Ubuntu 20.04 it causes my computer to logout and suspend itself repeatedly. It was happening in 19.1 as well, but not as much. I'm running a NVidia 1070ti, and thought it was an issue there with Proton since I was just starting games from the applications menu, but came to figure out it happens when I start the native Steam application. On the Proton side I already made sure the 32/64 bit libraries were there.

[Kepos]

When you write 'native Steam', how did you install it? I'm not on Ubuntu, but heard about that there may be issues when installing Steam with Snap, which seems to be the new base install routine for Ubuntu, but is creating a very different path then expected.

[Kiba Snowpaw]

don't snap steam install it with the terminal. sudo apt install steam

[Marlock]

Originally posted by ズЇþÆ ŠÑΘwǷÆw:

don't snap steam install it with the terminal. sudo apt install steam

normally this would be the correct answer, but Ubuntu 20.04 has started using empty apt packages to install snapd and the snap version of some apps...

I'm not sure Canonical has up and done this to Steam like they notoriously did to Chromium, but you should be aware that at some point the result of apt install steam might no longer be what we usually expect.

Again, this is new territory and I don't know if they did it to Steam specifically. I sure wish it hasn't, but already heard a rumor before this thread.

ps: I'd actually like others using that distro to comment on this too, and confirm if steam packaging on Ububtu 20.04 is still normal, because I'll soon upgrade to Linux Mint 20 and it will be affected by the decisions of its parent distro.
https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3906

[WarnerCK]

Originally posted by Marlock:

I'm not sure Canonical has up and done this to Steam like they notoriously did to Chromium

It's just chromium that they're dogfooding, since it's not the default browser and browsers are things that you want sandboxed. The other things that they were testing as snaps in previous default installs, like the calculator, are no longer snaps.

Mint users are the second-biggest users of snaps, so the Mint people have blocked installing snapd and told their users that they should compile chromium from source.

[*****]

Thanks for replying. What I meant by 'steam native' was calling the steam ap itself, not having another program calling it for me. That should eliminate anything involving proton and probably nVidia performance issues as they are not used to just pull up the steam client. The Steam app was installed in 19.1 using apt, not snap. The problem was there a bit in retrospect, but I blamed it on connection/proton issues as it was happening in games only. Once I updated to 20.04 it happens every couple of minutes.

[*****]

Well, file it under 'do the obvious, you moron'.
sudo apt install -reinstall steam
did the trick. Thanks for the help, sorry to have missed something this obvious.