This is meant to exit when its parent process does, but because Steam runs it via sh -c, its parent is actually the shell rather than Steam.

Please could a Steam developer set this up to be run either directly (not via a shell), or if the shell is necessary for some other reason, with exec steam-runtime-launcher-service --alongside-steam? That way, it should exit automatically.

+1

Although my leftover process is not named steam-runtime-launcher-service.

After exiting steam or killing it by killall steam there is a leftover process (sometimes two) and I cannot reopen steam.

If I try to force kill the leftover process by killall PID or kill -9 ... the process refuses to shut down. Only option is to restart PC to be able to open Steam again.

Although my leftover process is not named steam-runtime-launcher-service

Then it is not this issue: please report it separately.

@3331 wrote:

The process steam-runtime-launcher-service stays alive after fully closing steam

This appears to have been a distro-dependent issue: it worked as intended in Arch and other distros where /bin/sh is bash (for example Fedora, although I have not verified that), but not in Debian-derived distros like Ubuntu, where /bin/sh is the smaller/simpler dash shell.

Please could a Steam developer set this up to be run either directly (not via a shell), or if the shell is necessary for some other reason, with exec steam-runtime-launcher-service --alongside-steam? That way, it should exit automatically.

This change was made in or before Steam beta 1695334486, fixing this issue (I can no longer reproduce the problem on an Ubuntu 22.04 system while running the beta). It should propagate into the general-availability branch next time there is a big update from the beta branch.

A mitigation is that if you exit and re-run Steam, the leftover steam-runtime-launcher-service --alongside-steam process will be replaced by a new one, so there should be no more than one steam-runtime-launcher-service --alongside-steam process at any given time - this is a leak of one process per boot, not one process per Steam start.

@hustin-paul wrote:

After exiting steam or killing it by killall steam there is a leftover process (sometimes two) and I cannot reopen steam.

I cannot reproduce this on my test systems, one of which did reproduce the lingering steam-runtime-launcher-service process. When I exit from Steam, all Steam processes exit within a few seconds (except for steam-runtime-launcher-service if I am running the non-beta branch on Debian/Ubuntu). Please open a separate issue with more details if you can still reproduce this.

Just noticed the same behavior on my Debian system. Though killall steam-runtime-launcher-service helps to get rid of it, it's still a bit annoying, especially considering that Steam also leaves a significant amount of some "u1000-*" labeled junk in the /dev/shm/, which also requires manual cleaning, but that’s another story.

This is already fixed in the beta branch. If this is sufficiently annoying to you, please use the beta, and report any regressions as separate issues.

a significant amount of some "u1000-*" labeled junk in the /dev/shm/

That's out of scope for this particular issue report.

This appears to be fixed