I actually like this situation :)
To be sincere, I had some non-Steam games that either crashed or required workarounds to disable the Steam Runtime (for example: Dolphin, the emulator, which used to crash on older betas if using the runtime), while after the 12/!3 update, I no longer need special workarounds (and the overlay works fine). That's on a 64-bit Debian Testing, at least.
What about adding a launch option for non-Steam games so you can specify if you want to use or not the runtime?
Well it's mixing code built for it with code not built for it and can cause issues. In my case it totally broke the functionality: aka i cannot start anything 32bit from steam anymore due to dependencies of the overlay, while they work fine outside steam. The reason is also not really evident as they just -don't do anything- at a first look.
So broken overlay and broken functionality for me on archlinux.
Also note that even drm free games from game developers are usually better under the runtime than not. (had plenty of games not running in my too recent environment, but running fine on the steam runtime).
Surely an option for the single game and globally (like how it's being done from the "stop downloading on start option") could allow to solve the issue - obviously i would set the global one to enable ;)
@weltall , when you say that your system lacks a 32-bit lib used by the overlay which 32-bit lib and which part of the overlay do you mean? Was it from gameoverlayrender.so?
most probably. It's the libXtst.so.6 which is shown as missing if i do ldd of the gameoverlayrenderer.so.
An upcoming Steam client beta will fix the dependency on libXtst.
The change to not use the Steam runtime with non-Steam games was deliberate and seems more correct than forcing an environment for a game that wasn't developed in that environment. We'll keep this issue open as a feature request for the user-controllable behavior.
Nothing extracted yet.
Since the beta update of 13th december when launching a non steam game the system libraries are used: this can cause issues with the overlay and breaks testing of steam games not yet available from a steam depot.
Easy step to reproduce:
Using the stable version and before that update the ldd output was correctly pointing to steam-runtime folders for all dynamic libraries.
In my case my system lacks a 32bit lib used by the steam overlay which even breaks starting games as non steam games (game which work fine if ran outside of steam).