Steam crashes on 21.04

I don't use steam very often, but know it worked previously on this machine. Recently it's stopped working, crashing on launch. I'm running Kubuntu 21.04 on X11 (not wayland). Things I have already tried:

• Reboot
• Ensure I am up to date via apt
• steam --reset - which gets steam working for one launch, then fails on next launch
• Remove steam and reinstall steam-installer
• Ensure I have i386 arch enabled

Running steam in a terminal produces a large log, and submits a crashdump. The key error at the bottom is:

/home/alan/.steam/debian-installation/steam.sh: line 772: 2249077 Segmentation fault (core dumped) $STEAM_DEBUGGER $DEBUGGER_ARGS "$STEAMROOT/$STEAMEXEPATH" "$@"

Further up, and more interestingly:

Steam: An X Error occurred
X Error of failed request: BadAtom (invalid Atom parameter)
Major opcode of failed request: 20 (X_GetProperty)
Atom id in failed request: 0x0
Serial number of failed request: 12
xerror_handler: X failed, continuing
Steam: An X Error occurred
X Error of failed request: BadAtom (invalid Atom parameter)
Major opcode of failed request: 20 (X_GetProperty)
Atom id in failed request: 0x0
Serial number of failed request: 13
xerror_handler: X failed, continuing
Steam: An X Error occurred
X Error of failed request: BadAtom (invalid Atom parameter)
Major opcode of failed request: 20 (X_GetProperty)
Atom id in failed request: 0x0
Serial number of failed request: 14
xerror_handler: X failed, continuing

What can I do other than steam --reset to get steam working again?

1 Answer

Turns out this is a bug in steam, which is currently (as of 28/06/2021) only available in the beta builds of steam client. You need to launch steam to switch to the beta builds, and when it doesn't launch, that's tricky. So for the moment, do the following:

• Run steam --reset
• Login to steam
• If you use "family view" you may need to enter your pin
• In steam, go to Steam menu -> Settings -> Beta participation -> Change button
• In the "Beta Participation - Steam" window, change Beta participation drop-down from "NONE - Opt out of all beta programs" to "Steam beta update"

• Click OK

• Restart steam.
• Steam will download an update

• Steam will re-launch, into the beta.

Everything should work at this point. Feel free to opt back out of the beta once the above bug is in the stable release of steam client.