@Burrito-Bazooka steam reporting that it can't find the bootstrap is a safety measure to prevent steam from messing itself up worse than before when it is installed in a way that was not expected by valve devs. As for the actual issue, that is much better documented on #4077.
I had the same issue.
It happened after a replay download in Dota2.
DotA crashed, steam crashed and this error message appeared.
Nothing extracted yet.
After today's beta update, I get the error message mentioned in the title. It happens when I try to start Steam, and Steam doesn't start successfully.
I use SolydX, which is based on Debian Testing.
Here's the error as seen from command line:
wat do? Do I reinstall steam? Or is this fixable without reinstalling?edit: I 'fixed' it by moving ~/.steam/steam.sh to another place. This triggered /usr/games/steam to reinstall the important parts of Steam when I tried to start it. Still a bug, though, because you don't expect an update to disable your installation.