Steam sometimes ignores forcedesktopscaling / STEAM_FORCE_DESKTOPUI_SCALING

steamclosed Steam clientDistro Family: NixOS

ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#11200 · opened 2024-08-20 by different-name · updated 2025-05-20 · 7 comments · github

Ddifferent-name 2024-08-20 github

Your system information

Steam client version (build number or date): 1721173382
Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): NixOS
Opted into Steam client beta?: No
Have you checked for system updates?: Yes
Steam Logs: -
GPU: Nvidia

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

Occasionally, when launching steam, it launches with another scaling value other than the one set by both the -forcedesktopscaling launch option and the STEAM_FORCE_DESKTOPUI_SCALING environmental variable
Relaunching steam will have a good chance at fixing the issue, seems to have a small chance of happening each launch (~25%)

Steps for reproducing this issue:

Launch steam with force desktop scaling set

SSunspark-007 2024-08-28 github

Setting this environment variable works for me.

export STEAM_FORCE_DESKTOPUI_SCALING=1.5

Ddifferent-name 2024-08-28 github

Setting this environment variable works for me.

export STEAM_FORCE_DESKTOPUI_SCALING=1.5

Sorry I made a mistake in my issue, I am using the same environmental variable, I'll edit it

Ddifferent-name 2024-09-12 github

This is happening almost every launch now it seems

Ttlneondo 2024-09-13 github

Even after the recent update, Steam does not launch with the correct scaling on on Fedora KDE

Ddifferent-name 2024-09-30 github

Still experiencing this issue, steam often ignores this scaling and uses the gtk scaling

Ddifferent-name 2024-11-13 github

It seems going into big picture and back out will make steam 3 or 4x the scale, not sure if that is related

Ddifferent-name 2025-05-20 github

I haven't been able to reproduce this issue in a while, closing

Nothing extracted yet.