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While I haven't seen it noted in any of the recent changelogs for the Steam Client Beta, it seems it has an updated Steam Runtime in need of some testing.

Sending word to us on Twitter, developer Timothee Besset said:

The beta branch of the steam client for GNU/Linux has received several updates to it's runtime for games. Make sure to test your favorite titles! CC @gamingonlinux @Plagman2

For those of you who want to ensure everyone has a good experience and to ensure games you love don't break with a new stable Steam Client release, it's time to get testing and reporting. It's probably a good idea to let Valve know of any issues on their Steam for Linux GitHub.

What is the Steam Runtime? From the GitHub:

A binary compatible runtime environment for Steam applications on Linux.

Essentially, it includes a set of libraries for game developers to link their games against. This is to give them a somewhat standard set of libs that should work across distributions for games shipped on Steam.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Beta, Steam, Valve
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D34VA_ Oct 24, 2018
Sadly, this does not seem to have fixed Quake Champions' connection issue.


Last edited by D34VA_ on 24 October 2018 at 9:45 pm UTC
Werner Oct 25, 2018
i think they need to recompile proton also to make use of it, so test again when they release a new proton beta
Leopard Oct 25, 2018
Quoting: aFoxNamedMorrisSadly, this does not seem to have fixed Quake Champions' connection issue.

They are working on it.
FireBurn Oct 25, 2018
Quoting: x_wing
Quoting: FireBurnAny idea what they've changed? New packages? Updated packages?

I have to run this command so I use the native packages on my machine to prevent segfaults

find ~/.steam/root/ \( -name "libgcc_s.so*" -o -name "libstdc++.so*" -o -name "libxcb*.so*" -o -name "libvulkan.so*" \) -print -delete

I remember a guy that run this command but replaced the steam directory with the root directory (and with sudo!)

As advice, remember to check every command you use with this: https://explainshell.com/

About steam runtime, I though that steam was using system libraries by default. Maybe the problems happens with games (or proton) preferring steam runtimes libs?

I have to run with STEAM_RUNTIME_PREFER_HOST_LIBRARIES=0 too as most of my libraries are too new for the games using them, delete the above and everything runs fine using the steam runtime
Vash63 Oct 25, 2018
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I think they need to ship two runtimes - a historical one to honor their promise of old games working indefinitely and a new one for new games and Proton. New one should be based on 18.04.
F.Ultra Oct 25, 2018
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Quoting: Luke_NukemIt annoys me so much that the Steam Runtime was the necessary solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.

Other then forcing library writers to maintain a backwards compatible stable (aka new functions can be added) ABI there is just no other way to solve this. Or we could go the Windows way and have every game bundle every single library that they use so we will have 2 million instances of openssl with varying degrees of security holes in them on our drives.
F.Ultra Oct 25, 2018
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Quoting: Vash63I think they need to ship two runtimes - a historical one to honor their promise of old games working indefinitely and a new one for new games and Proton. New one should be based on 18.04.

I think they will considering that the current runtime lives in directories named "ubuntu12_32" and "ubuntu12_64", if they never planned to keep the historical ones they wouldn't have named them in this way.

edit: but then I read the post from @hateball so things might not be so clear after all. I guess that one major problem here is that Steam does not know which version of the runtime a specific game is built for (unless they have such meta-data).


Last edited by F.Ultra on 25 October 2018 at 8:51 pm UTC
Leopard Oct 26, 2018
Quoting: GuestSeems to have broken at least The Tiny Bang Story, game expects libGLEW1.6 and now there is only 1.10 present.
Not quite sure how to report that properly, but I made a post on the games forums... https://steamcommunity.com/app/96000/discussions/0/1733216893876281579/

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime
beniwtv Oct 26, 2018
Quoting: devnullQuite frankly I'm at the point of blaming networks for turning off older TLS with no fallback.

The fallback is called "newer TLS version", and has been supported by OSes and applications for quite a while. Obviously old GnuTLS didn't support them. GnuTLS 2.6.6 was released on 2009-04-30, more than 9 years ago. We did not even know about the vulnerabilities back then.

Blaming networks for caring about your data's security and disabling these broken protocols seems a bit odd.

The issue here isn't GnuTLS or the networks, but the Steam runtime being so old and not being kept up to date (at least the security relevant parts of it should be updated).
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