Hello @Citrom67, would you happen to be using an Optimus laptop which is configured to run X on the NVIDIA GPU? Please run Steam from a terminal where it renders, then copy your system information from Steam (Steam -> Help -> System Information) and put it in a gist, then include a link to the gist in this issue report.
I suspect you're seeing something similar to #8179.
Steam does not depend on zenity, it's only used to show some messages on failure paths.
Hello @kisak-valve, I don't use a laptop, but I do own a GTX 750Ti, I've uploaded the gist here.
Hope you can figure out something from it
Maybe give #8069 a read and see if something similar has happened on your system? There's not many things that could differ between starting Steam from a desktop shortcut and from a terminal. The question which should be asked is what is the difference in the environment that Steam is run in between the two.
Desktop icon log
Interestingly enough I don't get any log out of steam when I launch it in the terminal for some reason
But I tried modifying the command the icon executes, and even tho I execute the same command just from the terminal, it doesn't work, the black screen still stays
I encountered this issue when upgrading Manjaro from 5.10.93-1 to 5.15.16-1. I was able to solve it by switching from video-nvidia to video-nvidia-470xx.
Since then I switched back to Linux Mint
I was only trying out distros anyways, but it seems Im gonna stick with ubuntu or debian for a while
If anyone will have a clear solution that works for multiple people, I'll edit it into the post and close the issue tho
Hello @Citrom67, that's an invitation for this issue report to become a catch all for too many lookalike issues that need to be investigated separately. If someone else comes across a similar issue, it should be evaluated separately.
Closing per the last comment.
I'm having the same exact problem, except I'm using Arch Linux, I quadruple checked all dependencies and packages and everything looks great, still Steam just shows a black screen.
Disabling hardware acceleration fixes it, but I want my GPU to render the UI. The reason why it works from a ALT + Fx terminal is that it doesn't maybe expose the GPU properly, so it falls back to disabled HW acceleration.
Is there any viable workaround for this, other than disabling hardware acceleration? I don't seem to be able to find this problem easily, but I can still reproduce this on every single system right now, was fine until 4 months ago, I think this should get more visibility.
If you still have window settings available you can attempt clicking on "Big Picture".
After it launches I had to close Steam again, but after relaunching Steam once more all windows immediately went back to normal (no longer black boxes).
I just ran into this bug, Manjaro 25.0 xfce. Not sure if it's connected, but it happened after a reboot and I had changed my desktop resolution from 3840x1080 to 5120x1440 and was the first launching of Steam since resolution change. I was able to resolve the issue by:
Nothing extracted yet.
Your system information
Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:
Describe what you expected should happen and what did happen. Please link any large code pastes as a Github Gist
I expected when I open up steam, to you know, look like steam, but it is just black, no UI, no colors, just black...
Though the UI itself works, I just can't see it, even tho zenity is installed as I've read in previous issues that it relies(/relied) on it somewhat.
And interestingly enough, when I press alt+f2 and launch steam via the steam command or from terminal, the UI loads as normal, so it only happens when I open from desktop icon, or the cinnamon menu.
System Information Gist
Steps for reproducing this issue: