[General] - Steam litters home directory with many visible `dot-steam.bak` folders during a gamescope-session crash loop

steamopen Distro Family: SteamOS

ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#11878 · opened 2025-04-04 by matte-schwartz · updated 2026-08-01 · 3 comments · github

Mmatte-schwartz 2025-04-04 github

Your system information

Steam client version (build number or date): 1743720314
Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): SteamOS
Opted into Steam client beta?: Yes
Have you checked for system updates?: Yes
Steam Logs: go-s-dotfile-logs.tar.gz
GPU: AMD Z2 Go (Rembrandt APU)

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

If the Steam client is sent into a crash loop while loading into gamescope-session, it leaves behind a lot of folders in the $HOME directory that are all titled dot-steam.bak.1742584962/ or some variation of that.

It seems like maybe these are meant to be .steam.bak.1742584962/ so they end up hidden in the home directory? The gamescope crash that causes this has been reported separately, but the log folders cluttering $HOME looked like a Steam bug of its own.

Steps for reproducing this issue:

Start in desktop mode on SteamOS 3.7 or 3.8

mkdir -p ~/.config/gamescope/scripts/
copy this lua config file to ~/.config/gamescope/scripts/crash.lua
load into gamescope-session and let gamescope start crashlooping

AAzarilh 2025-12-14 github

Still a problem.

RRatstail91 2026-05-10 github

can they be safely removed?

Hhariedo 2026-08-01 github

Still an issue on Steam Machine / SteamOS Halo.

These are rather small, 20KB total each backup, but it's pretty annoying to litter the $HOME this way. The big number is just Unix Epoch time, seconds since the beginning of the year 1970.

Proposed:

put them in ~/.cache or a new ~/.backups to avoid Dolphin clutter
when making a new one, remove any that are over N days old
document how they can be restored/used... anywhere someone can find

Nothing extracted yet.