This is even worse when Steam takes literal ages to process said shaders. Tried running Apex Legends on Fedora 38 (Gnome, X11, intel i9, nVidia) and after 10 minutes it only got to 56%. An option to skip would be great.

I play Dota 2 and this also infuriates me, the previous UI shows the small window about launching the game and shows the Processing Vulkan Shader progress which can be skipped, and in Dota 2, you don't actually need to pre-process the shader, it's redundant, but in the new UI, you can't skip it, so the CPU do something literally useless for at least 15 minutes now (I have slow CPU, Core i3-8100).

Update:
It actually takes more than 15 minutes...

Valve pls fix

This affect some other dialogs that previously used the old UI (VGUI?) such as selecting custom game artwork.

I also noticed this with Apex Legends
Since Apex has a DX12 beta and it works amazing with Proton you can skip entirely the vulkan shaders processing

Now i need to pre-process the Vulkan shaders even if i dont use them

Yeah, this is super frustrating. Shader compiling for Borderlands 2 and The Pre-Sequel can take many tens of minutes to complete, and doesn't even seem to make any noticeable difference in the game. I've been hitting "cancel" on those reflexively for ages now. I don't even want to launch those games anymore on my laptop because it makes my fans run at full tilt for ages.

Relatedly, I'd very much appreciate getting the dialogs back which inform me that an "external" update is happening -- like when Steam is updating Proton or Steam Linux Runtime. Those operations are usually pretty quick, but more information is better than less. I want to know what my system's doing. If you're gonna hide stuff by default, fine. At least give me the option of turning it back on, though.

For me, Apex Legends Shader Compilation takes multiple Hours (Like 3-5Hours or more) and the bad thing is that on the next day I still need to compile the Shaders but mostly for a shorter time like 1h to 30min or less if I am lucky.

I always skipped them but now I just can't

Yea, really annoying.. I see the pros and cons. But I rather deal with a bit of stuttering and jump right into the game. The wait time on this one game was absolutely brutal.. Nearly 45 minutes.

I'm actually tempted to stop beta testing over this.. If valve ships this feature.. Expect the hate. Big time.

Apex take for ever to finish Shader Compilation and sometimes I just skip it when I just wanna play friends really fast, so It's nice important to have the skip button back

In the version 1684535786, they finally added a dialog to skip the Shader Compilation process, however, if you don't skip and wait until the process is finished, Steam become 100% unusable because the backdrop/blocker thingy still covers the entire Steam UI (but the dialog has already disappeared), even after the game has been closed, if you skip, however, the dialog and the backdrop disappear and Steam is usable.

Here's the screenshot when you wait until the process is completed:

Yes, it darkens the entire UI. No, it's not a "Not Responding" kinda thing, it's just a backdrop covering the whole UI. No, it's not clickthrough and can't be dismissed by any shortcut, closing (by using ALT+F4 in this case) and re-opening the Steam UI doesn't fix it, you have to exit steam and re-open it to be able to use it.

Can confirm this is a problem when you don't skip shader processing in the newest Steam Client version

Replying to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/9379#issuecomment-1555969223

I get a prompt to skip the shader compilation or cancel the launch. As far as I know both options work.

@kisak-valve So far no problem and work fine, it's just the user experience is not as good as the previous Steam version since it needs to open up the Steam Client main window to show this dialog compared to the previous standalone shader processing dialog. Also if you accidentally click anywhere outside the dialog it cancels the shader processing and won't run the game.

it's just the user experience is not as good as the previous Steam version since it needs to open up the Steam Client main window to show this dialog compared to the previous standalone shader processing dialog. Also if you accidentally click anywhere outside the dialog it cancels the shader processing and won't run the game.

Experiencing the same, it's actually annoying that the Steam main window pops up and doesn't automatically close again after.

Annoying workflow changes aside. I was missing the option completely.
However this appears to have been addressed in new build. Issue was only relevant in this commit.