protonscr

STEAM_FORCE_DESKTOPUI_SCALING no longer works on Beta branch

steamclosed Steam clientDistro Family: Arch
ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#12196 · opened 2025-07-12 by cprn · updated 2025-07-31 · 2 comments · github
Ccprn 2025-07-12 github

Your system information

  • Steam client version (build number or date): 1752195011 Fri, Jul 11 01:57 UTC -08:00

  • Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): Manjaro

  • Opted into Steam client beta?: [Yes/No] Yes

  • Have you checked for system updates?: [Yes/No] Yes

  • Steam Logs: [generate by running this command in a terminal tar -zcvf ~/Desktop/steam-logs.tar.gz ~/.steam/steam/logs] steam-logs.tar.gz

  • GPU: Nvidia/Intel/AMD AMD RX 7900 XTX, Mesa version 1:25.1.5-1

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

Describe what you expected should happen and what did happen. Please link any large code pastes as a Github Gist

I'm on 4K screen, i3wm window manager only. Yesterday UI scaling through STEAM_FORCE_DESKTOPUI_SCALING=1.8 worked perfectly fine, today it doesn't. It doesn't work with integer values either. It's completely ignored. It works fine after switching back to stable client.

Steps for reproducing this issue:

  1. Switch to Beta branch, then in terminal:
  2. STEAM_FORCE_DESKTOPUI_SCALING=1.8 /usr/bin/steam
  3. observe tiny unreadable UI
Ccprn 2025-07-12 github

Never mind, the slider in the Accessibility settings takes care of that... I had to glue my nose to the screen to find it, though. Could've been handled better, e.g.

  • the value of this new setting could've been copied from the env var
  • or there could've been a one version grace period for env var depreciation
  • or at least a clear message after update if the env var was set

Please, consider such options in the future. Cheers.

Rrinbega 2025-07-31 github

That definitely was not easy to find. Hopefully, at least Wayland will eventually get a native client that handles scaling according to the compositor's settings.

-forcedesktopscaling still "works", btw: the only thing it scales for me is the splash screen at startup.

Nothing extracted yet.