No Text on Steam Client

[50 Shades of Orange]

Hi there, Steam has been working fine but recently I have no text in menus or notifications..! I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling but to no avail.. Any ideas?

[Waitsnake]

RusticChevalier lähetti viestin:

As well as the missing UI text, I'm getting messages saying steamclean quit unexpectedly every time I run the Steam client.

Had this error message too on my M1 MBA (Monterey 12.6 (21G115)). The error seams somehow related to Rosetta 2. A reinstall of Steam and Rosetta did not help though.

I had 2 binaries of steamclean in my Steam folder:
~/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/steamclean
~/Library/Application Support/Steam/Steam.AppBundle/Steam/Contents/MacOS/steamclean
Only the binary in steamapps crashed for me with a Rosetta error while the one in Steam.AppBundle worked fine.

This is the error in terminal when running it in the failure causing folder:
"rosetta error: /var/db/oah/*/steamclean.aot: attachment of code signature supplement failed: 1"

So it seams the code signature is only accepted from macOS within rosetta when steamclean is running from its original place in Steam.AppBundle. But the copy of steamclean that Valve creates later at runtime into the steamapps folder will be not accepted to run and missing the code signature. Unfortunately only the binary in steamclean is executed and causes then the error. So I it looks like a issue on Valve side or Apple had just more strengthened the security with some update and Valve had not noticed it yet.

So delated the binary in steamapps folder and symlinked it to the Steam.AppBundle folder:
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Steam/steamapps
rm steamclean
ln -s ../Steam.AppBundle/Steam/Contents/MacOS/steamclean

Since I symlinked it I don't see those "steamclean quit unexpectedly" messages anymore when running Steam.

[stuff]

Waitsnake lähetti viestin:

RusticChevalier lähetti viestin:

So delated the binary in steamapps folder and symlinked it to the Steam.AppBundle folder:
cd ~/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps
rm steamclean
ln -s ../Steam.AppBundle/Steam/Contents/MacOS/steamclean

Since I symlinked it I don't see those "steamclean quit unexpectedly" messages anymore when running Steam.

Thanks for posting that – nice investigative work! I'll give the symlinking a try when I'm back at my M1 Mac later.

None of the UI problems have occurred on my 2014 Mac Mini (also running macOS Monterey 12.6) so I guess the UI missing text and missing store menu also only happen on Macs with Apple Silicon. Were either/both of these UI issues solved by what you did?

[stuff]

I've now tried the symlinking workaround and can confirm it stops steamclean from crashing but the UI issues are still present.

[Waitsnake]

Sorry to hear that. I had actually only the problem with the crashing of steamclean and that annoying error message caused by it that was interrupting gaming every few minutes. But my steam UI always looked good and text was readable. So these two issues seams not related to each other. Since I have newest steam client and newest Monterey updates and running it on a M1 Mac (MBA 2020) and did not have the UI problem it seams to be only related to Intel Macs. Maybe they changed up the graphics drivers for Intel Iris Graphics or Intel HD Graphics in a recent update for those Macs?

[stuff]

Waitsnake lähetti viestin:

Sorry to hear that. I had actually only the problem with the crashing of steamclean and that annoying error message caused by it that was interrupting gaming every few minutes. But my steam UI always looked good and text was readable. So these two issues seams not related to each other. Since I have newest steam client and newest Monterey updates and running it on a M1 Mac (MBA 2020) and did not have the UI problem it seams to be only related to Intel Macs. Maybe they changed up the graphics drivers for Intel Iris Graphics or Intel HD Graphics in a recent update for those Macs?

Thanks :) To clarify, the UI problem is only occurring on my M1 Mac (also a MBA 2020) and it happened after the 12.6 update. It is not occurring on my Intel Mac. Guessing therefore it could be somehow related to some 3rd party software on affected macs.

[Waitsnake]

Sorry I mixed it up on witch of your systems you had the no-text-issue.
Since we both seams to have nearly similar hard- and software configurations on our M1 Macs but have different behaviour related to this no-text-issue it is really hard to guess what causing it?

The only hardware difference our systems still could have related to graphics is the number of GPU cores and maybe the size of the RAM since GPU and CPU share it. I have here a 8‑Core GPU and 16 GB RAM. Maybe a 7‑Core GPU system behaves differntly?

But more likely it could be a software issue. Maybe you could give Onyx from titanium-software a try and clean some caches of the operating system and let them rebuild?
I run Onyx once in a while and clear most of the program- and system-caches. I only avoid clearing the Spotlight-, Mail- and Fonts-Caches since these 3 in particular need more time to rebuild than the others. But since we talking here about a no-text-issue maybe clearing the font-cache is something worthwhile to try?
Other then that I have really no idea what kind of 3rd party software could cause a graphics problem like I saw it in the screenshot.
It is definitely good that you raised a support ticket for it.

[stuff]

Waitsnake lähetti viestin:

Maybe you could give Onyx from titanium-software a try and clean some caches of the operating system and let them rebuild?
I run Onyx once in a while and clear most of the program- and system-caches. I only avoid clearing the Spotlight-, Mail- and Fonts-Caches since these 3 in particular need more time to rebuild than the others. But since we talking here about a no-text-issue maybe clearing the font-cache is something worthwhile to try?

Genius! Running the maintenance tasks has done the trick, the UI is back to normal. The Store menu is still missing from the menu bar but maybe that's by design. It shows up on my Intel Mac but not the M1 Mac.

By the way I have the 7-core MBA 2020 with 16GB RAM.

On the Onyx Maintenance tab I ran with the following ticked:

Verifying

• Structure of the file system

Rebuilding

• Launch Services database

Cleaning

• System
  
• Applications
  
• Internet
  
• Log messages and reports

Cleaning: options

• System
  
  • Components cache
• Applications
  
  • Applications cache
    
  • Previous music and TV libraries
    
  • Saved application states
    
  • Audio Units plug-ins cache
• Internet
  
  • DNS cache
    
  • Browser cache
    
  • Download cache
    
  • Items in the Mail downloads folder

Misc options

• Maintenance scripts
  
• Fonts cache
  
• Junk items
  
• Recent items
  
• Trash

A lot of those won't be relevant of course and maybe it was only the fonts cache that needed clearing as you suggested.

[Waitsnake]

Glad I could help. :)

Caches are generally a good idea to speed-up computer systems, but on the other hand they unfortunately tend to aggregate also errors over a long time. So cleaning caches once in while helps sometimes.

But I have also no idea witch one of the many caches causes the problem in the end. So it is good that you documented your Onyx options so that other people with the same issue can try to replicate it.

[stuff]

RusticChevalier lähetti viestin:

The Store menu is still missing from the menu bar but maybe that's by design. It shows up on my Intel Mac but not the M1 Mac.

Just to clear this up in case it causes anyone any confusion, the Store menu in the Mac menu bar was added by the Metro Steam skin which I forgot I'd installed. After uninstalling it, Steam and the menu bar menus look the same on both machines.

[pixelgeek]

RusticChevalier lähetti viestin:

The response from Steam basically said the issue is with macOS and they recommended contacting Apple Support. I guess it's just a waiting game at this stage.

Way to support your software Valve!

[PiggiiePat]

Yeah, same. I wonder if this only happens in Mac with M1 chip ?

[Certified Dumbass]

i've gotten the same issue here... i tried re-installing many times but didnt work, i tried clearing every cache but still didnt work.

[Scott, President of Dominos]

pixelgeek lähetti viestin:

RusticChevalier lähetti viestin:

The response from Steam basically said the issue is with macOS and they recommended contacting Apple Support. I guess it's just a waiting game at this stage.

Way to support your software Valve!

They're planning on dropping MacOS support once Rosetta ends anyway.

[Toastyy]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/22wzq3/comment/cgrh0vo/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

This worked for me.

[Enjineer]

Update: I just updated to Ventura and updated my Steam client, and now it's completely fixed.