Linux Mint having trouble opening steam on boot

[CarcinOxygen]

I installed Linux Mint 21.3 Cinnamon a week or so ago and Steam has been technically usable but extremely slow. Each time on boot it takes 2 minutes to start, and often says that the steam webhelper isnt working, and i have to restart it. Upon opening applications it tells me to prechache vulcan shaders which sometimes doesnt even happen, so i have to restart it multiple times.

Im not sure if theres a workaround for this, or if its just a quirk of steam on linux.

[Omega]

Steam for Linux has been very buggy for the last month or two.

[Electric Cupcake]

I haven't experienced anything like that on Kubuntu.

[Ranzera]

Steam has been pretty responsive for me on Mint, I'm not sure what trouble you're running into there. I do have to do the shader thing whenever I launch a game though. It usually takes around 5-20 seconds for me, depending on the game.

[It's Chase]

That's one of the worst distros to run Steam on.

[CarcinOxygen]

Originally posted by It's Chase:

That's one of the worst distros to run Steam on.

Which one do you reckon works best? Should i use Pop! instead? I heard that ones the "Gamers" Linux Distro

[CarcinOxygen]

Originally posted by Ranzera:

Steam has been pretty responsive for me on Mint, I'm not sure what trouble you're running into there. I do have to do the shader thing whenever I launch a game though. It usually takes around 5-20 seconds for me, depending on the game.

It can take over a minute for me, though second time around its exponentially faster. I noticed after installing a few of the dpkg updates that showed up it seems to be playing nicer.
I suppose its just a matter of staying vigilant with drivers, kernels and the like.

Praying to higher powers that i dont have to re-install linux yet another time this past month

[r.linder]

Originally posted by CarcinOxygen:

Originally posted by It's Chase:

That's one of the worst distros to run Steam on.

Which one do you reckon works best? Should i use Pop! instead? I heard that ones the "Gamers" Linux Distro

Most "gaming" distros are just prepackaged with gaming-related packages, there's nothing special about most of them, almost any distro can game

Mint is fine, a lot of Steam For Linux users use Mint for gaming, Arch and Fedora based distros can generally perform better though, like Arch and Nobara run games faster than Windows 11 for the most part whereas Pop!_OS loses somewhat often. As far as a "gaming" distro goes if you have the hardware, something like Nobara is better since it's set up pretty much out of the box for gaming and streaming and it just performs better, plus you get the option during installation to not have to use GNOME as a DE

[KalGimpa]

what kernel are you using?

i went back to 5.15.0-105 because if issues with nvidia

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Why launch Steam via OS Startup. Wait until after the OS fully loads the Desktop before launching Steam. You'd think people would learn by now; what year is this?; are your brand new to all of this?

[Omega]

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

Why launch Steam via OS Startup. Wait until after the OS fully loads the Desktop before launching Steam. You'd think people would learn by now; what year is this?; are your brand new to all of this?

Only on Windows.

On Linux start applications are launched by the desktop itself. On many desktop your panels and docks are also application launched through this same method. If it is launching stuff you can assume it is ready to receive them.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Could be a bug; check what Kernel you are on.

[CarcinOxygen]

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

Could be a bug; check what Kernel you are on.

Currently on the current (6.5.0-35-generic) Kernel for Linux Mint, and the current version of the Steam Client. The main issue that the first boot seems to have is with the steam client webhelper. What happens is that it says its not working, i try to restart it, it says its not working again, then steam opens anyway. This whole song and dance can take around 5 minutes by my rough estimate.
The Vulcan shader thing isnt as much of an issue, as said earlier its only like a minute tops, its mostly the bootup on start thats a PIMA

Im assuming this is a bug with Steam itself, because it can actually vary a lot how much it wants to drag its feet on a case by case basis.

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

Why launch Steam via OS Startup. Wait until after the OS fully loads the Desktop before launching Steam. You'd think people would learn by now; what year is this?; are your brand new to all of this?

So when is my Desktop "Done" starting up? Is it when the rest of the icons on my desktop load in? Is it the little sound my desktop makes after going to it for the first time? Is there a secret thing im otherwise missing? Because i start up steam after all those criteria are met typically. This works on Windows well enough. I might be missing something with how Linux systems finish booting.

Originally posted by Omega:

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

Why launch Steam via OS Startup. Wait until after the OS fully loads the Desktop before launching Steam. You'd think people would learn by now; what year is this?; are your brand new to all of this?

Only on Windows.

On Linux start applications are launched by the desktop itself. On many desktop your panels and docks are also application launched through this same method. If it is launching stuff you can assume it is ready to receive them.

So, as far as I can tell, Steam isnt starting up on its own after boot on my Linux Mint partition the same way it does on Windows 10, i assume this is a setting? Does not having it automatically start up cause problems for some reason?

[Electric Cupcake]

Huh. Is it a snap or flat install, or regular apt?

[CarcinOxygen]

Originally posted by Electric Cupcake:

Huh. Is it a snap or flat install, or regular apt?

It's the snap install I believe. Should I try the apt install method instead?

[Electric Cupcake]

I don't know enough about snap sandboxing and permissions to say whether or not it might contribute to slow loading.

Slow loading and webhelper problems might be as simple as the network being slow.