EUREKA! Seems that my first intuition was correct though I wasn't thinking clear enough to realize it at the time. Steam was loading just fine, but was displaying on my closed laptop screen and not the monitor I have permenantly attached to it. Therefore when the console was losing focus it was because it was actually displaying the login screen on the laptop monitor. A quick setting in nvidia-setting to make my seconday monitor the primary display device fixed this! Thanks all for you help and sorry it ended up being such a simply issue.
Nothing extracted yet.
I am trying to get the linux Steam platform up and running on my Arch machine (Linux 3.19.2-1-ARCH x86_64) on an NVIDIA Corporation GF116M [GeForce GT 560M](as per lspci) running the 'nvidia' driver installed through pacman.
I have multilib enabled. I have the 32 bit libraries installed. I have every font in the archwiki page for steam installed and though I have bested my issues with the all too common direct rendering error I still cannot quite get to a login screen.
and then the console loses focus and hangs until I press ctrl+c . . .
In ~/.steam/steam/logs/ I have:
bootstrap_log.txt
connection_log.txt
content_log.txt
all of which do not seem to show anything relevant to the hang but here it is anyways in case you (or anyone else sees something useful).
bootstrap_log.txt
connection_log.txt
content_log.txt