Do you have XScreensaver? I highly suspect that it's what's causing the problem since it lets Steam notifications go through.

@kisak-valve sure looks like it

@LDD19 yeah I use XScreensaver.

Any update? Ran into something like this a few times after a client update. It absolutely killed the display manager yet the box itself was fine. Only real option was waiting for the OS to kill it or logging in from another host. PITA to say the least.

No changes on my end, still happens randomly.

Bumping, still relevant.
reproducible with view->screenshots->show on disk if steam's been running long enough to bloat the x-server, doesn't happen otherwise. (No xscreensaver*, lightdm,+awesomewm, nemo file manager. No compositor)

Related to #5764?

* or any other type of screensaver for that matter.

Confirming this here, Ubuntu 19.10, and gnome's screensaver frontend

Bumping, still relevant. reproducible with view->screenshots->show on disk if steam's been running long enough to bloat the x-server, doesn't happen otherwise. (No xscreensaver*, lightdm,+awesomewm, nemo file manager. No compositor)

Related to #5764?

• or any other type of screensaver for that matter.

@kisak-valve @BloodyIron @CocaineJohnsson @h1z1

I believe I've found the root of this issue.
When clicking show on disk the shared object vgui2_s.so will use system to call something like this:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=\"$SYSTEM_LD_LIBRARY_PATH\" PATH=\"$SYSTEM_PATH\" '/usr/bin/xdg-open' '/home/user/.steam/debian-installation/userdata/<some_id>/760/remote/730/screenshots/

To show files on disk, this is a problem because system waits for the command to finish which stalls the main thread that should be handling X input, so first of all it locks up steam until you are done viewing files on disk which is obviously not intended, and it also happens to be during some critical X input handling, which makes it lock up the device pointer across entire X session.

Temporary fix compile yourself or use attached file below this:

// compile:
// gcc main.c -ldl -O3 -s -shared -o system_fix.so
// start steam like this:
// LD_PRELOAD=<absolute_path_of_system_fix.so> steam
// or double fork:
// (LD_PRELOAD=<absolute_path_of_system_fix.so> steam &)
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdint.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <malloc.h>
#define __USE_GNU
#include <dlfcn.h>

static int (*real_system)(const char*) = NULL;

// tiny wrapper for system which forces a double fork for anything going through the system symbol
int system(const char* cmd)
{
    void* result;
    /* Call recursively */
    if(!real_system)
        real_system = ((int (*)(const char*))dlsym(RTLD_NEXT, "system"));

    if(!cmd)
    {
        return real_system(cmd);
    }

    size_t n = strlen(cmd) + 5;
    char* new_cmd = (char*)malloc(n);
    // force double fork anything going through system
    snprintf(new_cmd, n, "(%s &)", cmd);
    int res = real_system(new_cmd);
    free(new_cmd);
    return res;
}

__attribute__((constructor))
void constructor(void)
{
    unsetenv("LD_PRELOAD");
    void* handle = dlopen("libc.so.6", RTLD_LAZY);
}

Alternatively use the attached so file system_fix.so.gz, and start steam like this: LD_PRELOAD=<absolute_path_of_system_fix.so> steam

So to sum up, this is not related to #5764 or #5279.