protonscr

Steam attempts to activate UPower through Dbus for all of eternity

steamopen Steam client
ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#9312 · opened 2023-04-01 by ItsQuote · updated 2025-12-27 · 1 comments · github
IItsQuote 2023-04-01 github

Your system information

  • Steam client version (build number or date): Mar 29 2023, at 18:00:49
  • Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): Arch
  • Opted into Steam client beta?: Yes
  • Have you checked for system updates?: Yes

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

My system has UPower installed as a dependency for another package, and as I have no direct need for it I have upower.service masked in systemd. Steam, through DBus, attempts to activate upower.service every two seconds for as long as I have Steam running. I feel this is unusually excessive and does nothing but a) pollute my system journal b) waste system resources trying to activate a masked service.

Unless UPower is made a hard dependency for Steam on the Linux desktop, can we please make it calm down a touch when services like UPower are masked and can never start?

Steps for reproducing this issue:

  1. Mask upower.service via systemctl (e.g. systemctl mask upower.service as root)
  2. Run Steam
  3. journalctl -efb0 and watch the logs fill
    3a. https://gist.github.com/ItsQuote/a3804d8e4c07f3a6a5f3a0316992e52f
Ttrm109 2025-12-27 github

This issue is alive and well in 2025, almost 2026.

I ended up adding a dbus rule to deny upower.service requests. Fixed the issue of journalctl being spammed.

Nothing extracted yet.