For me, on Gentoo with KDE4, child windows spawned by steam are spawned minimized, since I have a secondary monitor to the left it appears on the secondary monitor's task-switch selector (or whatever it's called). I am able to alt-tab to that minimized window.

It would be nice if it was not spawned minimized, and not take focus when there is no game running.

I've actually experienced this bug for a long time, from what I can recall ever since Steam for Linux came out. It's annoying but not terribly important to me since I don't use Steam chat for reliable communication. Good that someone finally reported it though.

I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the Unity DE, as vanilla as it gets. Whenever I hear the sound that someone is sending me a message on Steam, I have to click on the Steam icon in the taskbar or double-click a friend in my Friends list to make the chat window appear.

I can confirm it's been happening for a long while.

On Tue, 26 Jan 2016 8:35 pm Rudy Bleeker [email protected] wrote:

I've actually experienced this bug for a long time, from what I can recall
ever since Steam for Linux came out. It's annoying but not terribly
important to me since I don't use Steam chat for reliable communication.
Good that someone finally reported it though.

I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the Unity DE, as vanilla as it gets.
Whenever I hear the sound that someone is sending me a message on Steam, I
have to click on the Steam icon in the taskbar or double-click a friend in
my Friends list to make the chat window appear.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/4280#issuecomment-174948995
.

There is no such issue on GNU\Debian 8 'jessie' x64_86 with the Xfce DE.

I can confirm this happening on Linux Mint 17.3 with Cinnamon, too.