[Ubuntu 22.04] Steam not responding, so often!

[Fhireman]

Ever since the Steam Client codebase changed after the Steam Deck launch I've been having a ton of machine freezing crashes(looks like a memory leak) with the .deb client.

Sometimes I get the "Steam not responding, force quit/wait" pop-up when I launch the client, sometimes when I launch a game(or while it's showing me the opening sequence of a game like Age of Empires 2 DE or Diablo 2 Resurrected) and sometimes while quitting the game.

If I don´t force quit it quickly enough it freezes up my entire system and I have to reboot before I can do anything again.
I also don't get it every time, I've been trying to see if other software might be influencing it but even when launching Steam after a clean boot it happens as well. Plus I've got the most vanilla out-of-the-box Ubuntu installed without any tweaks or plugins.

No other software(I use it for tons of stuff, video editing, music production, coding, game dev) except for the Steam client crashes my system.

I'm on the same system(no hardware changes) as before the Steam client changes. Before the change I didn't have any problems whatsoever.

Here's some additional info:

PC Hardware:
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 14ARE05
16GB RAM
AMD Ryzen 4800U
RENOIR (renoir, LLVM 15.0.7, DRM 3.54, 6.5.0-27-generic)
4,0 TB M.2 SSD

OS:
Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS

Steam:
Steam Beta Branch: Stable Client
Steam Version: 1709846872
Steam Client Build Date: Wed, Mar 6 21:28 UTC -08:00
Steam Web Build Date: Thu, Mar 7 22:17 UTC -08:00
Steam API Version: SteamClient021



Anything I can try to fix things?

[Zyro]

I'm not getting this, Debian/Nvidia here. I'm sure you tried the non-beta client?

[Fhireman]

Originally posted by Zyro:

I'm not getting this, Debian/Nvidia here. I'm sure you tried the non-beta client?

I'm on the regular .deb that comes from the Ubuntu 22.04 apt repo.

@Xenophobe haven't tried beta client yet but on stable it's very UNstable :p and yes the randomness I can confirm as well. Sometimes it works just fine and the next moment you click a menu in the Steam client or something and it shows me the "Force quit/wait" pop-up.

Trying to figure out if it's an AMD driver thing, an Ubuntu thing or a Steam thing but seeing that this didn't happen before the Steam codebase merge I believe it has to do with the Steam client itself.

[Zyro]

Originally posted by Fhireman:

Originally posted by Zyro:

I'm not getting this, Debian/Nvidia here. I'm sure you tried the non-beta client?

I'm on the regular .deb that comes from the Ubuntu 22.04 apt repo.

I, I missinterpreted this:
Steam Beta Branch: Stable Client
(I do find it odd from Steam to express this way that you're not using the beta...)
Xeno is on the beta, though:
Steam Beta Branch: Steam Beta Update

[Zyro]

Wild guess: If it's CEF related, maybe deleting Steam client web cache could help?

[Marlock]

the new UI is just not very stable... that being said:

if steam is causing freezes due to filled-up ram (not likely but not impossible at 16GB) you should be able to check the logs later for an out-of-memory kill event (the OS killing steam to free up memory instead of just freezing completely)

regardless of the exact reason, applying these changes in steam settings might reduce the issue occurence:
1) enable low bandwidth mode
2) enable low performance mode
3) disable community content in the library (should be right below 1 and 2)
4) disable hardware (gpu) acceleration for steam's UI (web components)

since you're on Ubuntu over an AMD GPU, you should also consider using Kisak's Mesa PPA for a newer version of the GPU driver

ps: do NOT install the proprietary drivers from AMD's website on linux... the opensource driver that comes bundled in Mesa out-of-the-box is better for gaming

[Fhireman]

Wish I could upload a vid here to show the problem.
Even scrolling through the Storage or Download pages in Settings sometimes hangs the Steam UI for a bit and it picks up again after a few seconds. After that it works fine again for some time.

I'll try all the suggestions from @Marlock (thanks btw) and see if it fixes anything for me.

[Fhireman]

I tried to uncheck the "Enable GPU accelerated rendering in web views" straight after my previous reply and it showed me the force quit/wait pop-up again and froze my laptop straight after it.

Something's finnicky here.

Edit:
Well it seems just unchecking that one(it remembered that I unchecked it after rebooting laptop) did a lot of good for the UI for now. No freezes during scrolling through settings pages so far and I clicked all around the interface and through the store to see if I could trigger the force quit/wait pop-up.

Will report back after a while :)

[Fhireman]

A day later and it still works fine, unchecking the GPU accelerated rendering in web views seems to have fixed my force quit/wait pop-ups in the Steam UI. Perhaps it's leaning on the GPU too much for rendering and seeing that it's only an iGPU it might be asking too much of it?

The only finnicky thing that's left is that whenever I hover over store, library, community and such that the Steam window seems to go out of focus.
In Ubuntu 22.04 you can see "Activities" top-left and Steam to the right of it when the app is open but as soon as you hover over Store for example, Steam disappears and goes out of focus.

Probably more a GNOME desktop thing though.

[Fhireman]

It does sound like your issue is mostly network related since I never get those errors. I'm on a 1Gbit up/down fiber connection so don't have the congestion issues.

Perhaps try to bring your device to a friend's house and test some more to see if it persists?