Steam client 'recent game list' on taskbar icon

[SeriousCCIE]

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if there was a way to either clear the list of recent games, or set it via a configuration option (maybe a vdf file somewhere...?) to ensure that the list shown actually is for games installed on the computer it is showing it on.

I have different PCs with different OSes with different hardware and different capabilities, for different purposes... Steam will show me here on Linux the last few games I played on Windows. This is not helpful.

It will do the same on Windows once I leave the Linux machine--show me the last few games I played on Linux. That is also not helpful.

It doesn't take into account if the game shown is even capable of working on OS it shows it on.

It seems people on the Windows side of things like to blame it on jumplist settings or recently accessed programs, but clearly that is not what the concern is, since Steam will show me games I have 100% only played on Linux and aren't installed on the Windows client, when logged into Windows.

I imagine the Steam Deck will make the problem much more profound considering the processing power and use case scenarios being even more diverse.

I expect there is no solution for how Steam shows the most recently played games in the list, regardless of if they even are installed or could possibly work, but I thought I'd ask since it seems to be a problem on every OS I've installed Steam on, but no one seems to know (that I've read, anyway) if it can be properly tuned to the OS, installed games, or dare I say even the user's preferences... or not.

[Zyro]

Sounds like a reasonable (low priority) bug report. You could take it to the GitHub big tracker.

[SeriousCCIE]

Perhaps I will take you up on the suggestion and file this concern.

Before I would actually do so, I am going to hold out in vain hope that someone has similarly encountered and perhaps defeated this menace.

I can understand the original intent and purpose; so to some extent, it is a feature in that regard. However, it's a very contextually dependent feature as well, and I haven't seen anyone actually describe the issue as I have, which makes me wonder if anyone has ever noticed or if anyone has--and just quietly changed something locally that I haven't found.

It's been something it has done for a long time; I usually only use "exit" on that context menu since I haven't made a habit of using taskbar icons for navigation purposes. However, one day I lingered over the context menu and it greatly surprised me when it showed me software in that menu that wasn't installed on the PC it was showing it as an option. That meant it wasn't a recent jumplist item, and it was coming from my account.

The taskbar preferences in the settings of Steam, of course, have no option to change this behavior and it isn't even hinted at. It just is.

As you said, it's pretty minor, so I wouldn't expect anyone to announce they've overcome the challenge--some guides on Steam can be surprisingly detailed about stuff I thought was intuitive, but I haven't seen anything about this. As such I am hoping someone might have overcome it and didn't bother to say anything since it doesn't seem like it is a burning issue for many.

(It wouldn't occured to me to file it as a bug; if there's no solution after a while I'll see about reporting it as one!)

[Marlock]

Steam fetches the recently played games from your account info instead of from locally played info, and doesn't take off the locally unplayable ones...

looks like an 100% built-in behaviour from the steam client that nobody is likely to be able to customize on their own without Valve doing something on their end first...

I'd open the github issue sooner rather than later.

[STSchiff]

Couldn't find an issue about this and opened one here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/11911

Might be a different issue tho.