Steam works only if launched from terminal

[tgz]

I am using Steam from Valve's repo on Ubuntu 20.04. It worked fine till about two weeks ago. Till then I could use the app menu shortcut to start Steam. Now when I use the app menu shortcut, steam starts and then exits. It happened too fast to catch an error message.

So I tried launching from the terminal to catch the error and it worked. Steam launched properly, all games work properly, even over Proton.

For the app menu shortcut, I edited the launcher to get the app to run in the terminal. This didn't help. It still exits halfway into starting.

So now I am running steam by executing it through the terminal. It is just weird, and I wanted to know if someone else faced this, if the issue is known and a solution is available.

[jason]

Changing the file or its permissions in any way would likely have prompted a reload of the menu. Maybe that was all that was needed.

Execute permission should have made no difference. They cannot be run outside of something that already knows what to do with them.

[Chrykal]

Just had this problem occur today, fix for me appears to be editing the steam.desktop file,
changing

PrefersNonDefaultGPU=true

to

PrefersNonDefaultGPU=false

[cement_head]

Where can I find the steam.desktop file on Pop_OS 20.04?

[Zyro]

Install locate and call "locate steam.desktop" in the terminal. Or use the search facility of your desktop environment.

[hai]

yes lol

[Tuxar]

I was facing this problem due to some distro hopping but always keeping the steam folder to avoid having to download all games again.
In one of my new OS installation, steam started giving me this error. I 've just found a solution that worked for me.
Just copy the "steam.desktop" in "/usr/share/applications" to your user folder "/home/your_user/.local/share/applications" and all is ok again.