I'm having the exact same issue lately. After some time the app becomes completely unresponsive, menus don't render correctly (black boxes), alt tab to another app and the black box remains visible over other apps.

Ubuntu 23.10 / X11 / gnome
CPU: Intel® Core™ i5-4570S
Memory: 32Gb
GFx: AMD Radeon™ RX 570 Series

Only solution I've found so far is pkill steam multiple times and re-open it. Not been using steam too much lately so not sure when it became an issue.

edit:

I was not on beta, had this issue. Switched to beta and happened again after being open over night. Black boxes I was talking about

It does seem slightly better on beta though, before it was completely unresponsive. Now it kinda works but sluggish.

Same problem here. Constantly tabbing into steam just freezes it, resulting in 3 ends: it eventually recovers, it crashes and restarts or it just hangs forever. Resizing windows also breaks it sometimes, causing the store/library window to just freeze forever or leave a blank black screen. I'm using manjaro with kde plasma wayland.

Your system information
Steam client version (build number or date): 1707871101

Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): Manjaro 23.1 kernel 6.8.0.1

Opted into Steam client beta?: Yes

Have you checked for system updates?: Yes

GPU: AMD 6600XT

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5600G

RAM: 16 GB 3600

No solution found. Only SIGKILL'ing the process if it hangs forever.

I have the exact same issue lately. Restarting it seems to fix it for a time but it's to the point where I can't leave the application open for any extended period of time.

Your system information

• Steam client version (build number or date): 1705108172
• Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS
• Opted into Steam client beta?: No
• Have you checked for system updates?: Yes
• GPU: Nvidia GTX 970 / Intel i7 / 32gb Ram

The recent update has made stuff worse - opening a new window now almost crashes Steam itself. Something's going wrong with resource management I think, but not entirely sure.

Going to add those black boxes persist on my system even if I hide to tray the main steam window. They are over EVERYTHING until I kill the steam process.

Same issue, steam becomes unresponsive on moving window in KDE Plasma on Archlinux. Closing the window and opening it again makes the ui respond

i just witnessed the same it seems to be related to having friends open as well. I don't think it is related to sleep mode. It just will start getting unresponsive. Most of time it happens when the window is in background (not minimized) but not focused. Best way to reproduce it is to have steam window fullscreen, also opening friends list and then just start firefox (so that the focus is on firefox instead).. then browse a bit in firefoxand open a video.. Then you might later focusing steam and try to close it.. sometimes it will be unresponsive.

It's nothing to do with friends, I never use that

I have this same problem, the only fix for me is to turn off gpu accelerated webviews
Your system information
Steam client version (build number or date): 1718904662
Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): Fedora 40 Silverblue
Opted into Steam client beta?: No
Have you checked for system updates?: Yes
GPU: AMD 7800XT
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
RAM: 32 GB 5600 (xmp on)

Seems this has something to do with the steamwebhelper...

on i3wm this is pretty much your guaranteed experience. the fix is always just closing windows, and right clicking on steam in system tray to get to where you wanna go

but @rytrix suggestion of disabling webviews worked, under settings > interface

Same exact issue. I turned off GPU acceleration for webviews but the issue persists.

OS:

Operating System: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20260523
KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.26.0
Qt Version: 6.11.0
Kernel Version: 7.0.7-1-default (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 12 × AMD Ryzen 5 8600G w/ Radeon 760M Graphics
Memory: 32 GiB of RAM (30.5 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor 1: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT
Graphics Processor 2: AMD Radeon 760M Graphics

Steam:

Steam Beta Branch: Stable Client
Steam Version: 1780352834
Steam Client Build Date: Tue, Jun 2, 2026 1:04 AM UTC -08:00
Steam Web Build Date: Tue, Jun 2, 2026 12:43 AM UTC -08:00
Steam API Version: SteamClient023