Your system information

• Steam client version (build number or date): 1785799196 (originally installed eons ago via the steam distro package -- which just installs the installer and runs it from my understanding)
• Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): Lubuntu 24.04.4
• Opted into Steam client beta?: No
• Have you checked for system updates?: Yes
• Steam Logs: steam-logs.tar.gz
• GPU: Nvidia RTX 3060

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

Ever since the end of July, the Steam client has been unreliable. Initially nothing had changed on my system (not even OS package updates) in a very long time, so I suspect it was some silent Steam client update that got pulled in.

In an effort to try to remedy the issue, I performed all OS updates, upgraded the nvidia (proprietary) driver to 595.x.x as that is the current latest production branch as of this writing. I tried rebooting. I tried temporarily disabling various things from the command line, such as the CEF sandbox and a few other things. I tried disabling GPU acceleration during one of the times the Steam client managed to start successfully. None of these things ultimately made a difference.

The Steam client behavior boils down to one of these scenarios:

• The client will start fine and stay running
• The client will start, but crash later on by itself
• The client segfaults during startup
• The client continuously restarts (as viewed in the console) and the Steam client's crash dialog box appears, the one that has several radio buttons to choose an action. However the dialog itself disappears before I have a chance to even select anything

Usually if it's working, it may work many times consecutively. Other times it may not start up many times consecutively.

This has been very frustrating to say the least. Up until this point I've had very good luck with the Steam client on Linux and hardly ever had it segfault or otherwise crash unexpectedly on me.

I found that when I could get the crash to happen with DEBUGGER=gdb steam, it was pointing the steamui.so library, unlike a similar crashing report that was reported around the same time I started having problems:

src/steamUI/steamuisharedjscontroller.cpp (549) : Failed creating offscreen shared JS context
src/steamUI/steamuisharedjscontroller.cpp (549) : Failed creating offscreen shared JS context
/data/src/steamUI/steamuisharedjscontroller.cpp 549 Failed creating offscreen shared JS context
Thread 1 "steam" received signal SIGTRAP, Trace/breakpoint trap.
0xf4feb8ec in ?? () from /home/mscdex/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/steamui.so
(gdb) bt
#0  0xf4feb8ec in ?? () from /home/mscdex/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/steamui.so
#1  0xf4f23de1 in ?? () from /home/mscdex/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/steamui.so
#2  0xf4e4092c in ?? () from /home/mscdex/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/steamui.so
#3  0x567f418a in ?? ()
#4  0x567f563e in ?? ()
#5  0x567f6175 in ?? ()
#6  0xf7c72cb9 in ?? () from /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6
#7  0xf7c72d7c in __libc_start_main () from /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6
#8  0x567dc031 in ?? ()

Additionally, I've been having similar issues where after launching some games when Steam does load, the client silently (and regularly) crashes with the backtrace pointing to libSDL3.so every time. It doesn't happen immediately after the game launches, usually about 5-10 seconds afterward.

Steps for reproducing this issue:

1. Execute steam from the command line or from the application menu
2. Steam will randomly crash on startup with a segfault, before any GUI is shown. Also sometimes Steam will randomly crash while just sitting idle or while a game is being played (and at least on one occasion, seemingly taking the active game down with it but that could be coincidence).