Can you post your system information?
Sure. Here's lshw output as superuser: https://gist.github.com/cheery/790149bd559d7e362184
You probably want to know this too:
cheery@ruttunen:~$ uname -a
Linux ruttunen 3.11.0-19-generic [#33](/issue/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/33)-Ubuntu SMP Tue Mar 11 18:48:34 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Anything else?
@cheery steam systeminfo.
It's hard to get to steam's system information if steam does not launch as described in the OP, @cheery does running steam --reset from a terminal help?
Shortly after this happened, I removed the .local/share/Steam/ , except the SteamApps -directory. It's working again but it took something like 2 hours for me to get to play.
You might be able to create your own broken installation. I kept pressing the cancel -button when the steam updates. The update screen ended up having %appname%.
steam systeminfo returns:
Running Steam on ubuntu 13.10 64-bit
STEAM_RUNTIME is enabled automatically
I'm going to close this issue as there has been quite a bit of change in the steam client since 2014 and if this is reproducible, it would require a new investigation.
Nothing extracted yet.
The steam's been on for 3 days on my computer, now I wanted to play something and had to plug a device and restart. The thing's loading every update it can find. Can't skip it.
As the grand finale it messed up the update and doesn't start up anymore. steamui.so failed to load. + jammed and lost the keyboard. Had to reboot my machine.