steamwebhelper crash when switching to desktop mode

[voidyway]

[shahnawazshahin]

Hi. Again, thanks for reaching out.

It appears the script for Switch to Desktop works as it invokes steam --shutdown to exit Steam.

I believe this is a separate issue to Steam. Are you able to recreate this issue by launching Steam without Gamescope and then exiting?

[voidyway]

when i exit without gamescope it doesn't crash

[shahnawazshahin]

There is a new version of Gamescope being rolled out across distros. It's worth checking out the Gamescope GitHub page to see if your distro has the latest package. I do feel it is unrelated but who knows it might fix the issue.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope

It might also be worth clearing the cache on Steam to see if that helps.

[voidyway]

my distro doesn't have the latest gamescope version

[voidyway]

i found this post who has the same issue but with a different app

[shahnawazshahin]

Hi,

I found this as well. Not sure if this is related.

ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#9706

[shahnawazshahin]

Okay. I've installed Fedora 41 on my computer and I have managed to recreate the issue.

Indeed, running Gamescope + Steam, when you invoke a steam -shutdown Steam tries to shutdown gracefully. But for some reason steamwebhelper doesn't respond so the process gets killed instead. This causes abrt-applet to pop up with a notification as the Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT) picks it up (this is included in Fedora by default).

This is an issue with Gamescope + Steam. In the meantime, the workaround is to exclude any issues captured by ABRT from Gamescope + Steam.

To do this, add the following line to the /etc/abrt/abrt-action-save-package-data.conf file:

BlackList = steam

BlackListedPaths = ~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64/steamwebhelper

I've tested this and abrt-applet no longer pops up notifying issues with steamwebhelper.

I hope this helps. Further information on configuring ABRT can be found on:

https://abrt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/conf.html#abrt-specific-configuration

EDIT: I've tested this further. Whilst it works when testing within the desktop environment it doesn't stop the crash report popping up after reboot. If this is the case then please refer to the next comment.

[shahnawazshahin]

Following my last message, if the above doesn't work the next option is to add the following to the /etc/abrt/plugins/CCpp.conf file:

IgnoredPaths = ~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64/steamwebhelper

Restart abrtd.service (or restart your device) and this will ignore any issues or crashes with steamwebhelper.

More info on this configuration is available on https://access.redhat.com/solutions/62158.

[shahnawazshahin]

If all fails, whilst this is not an ideal solution, you can temporarily disable notifications when any application crashes until this gets resolved. This does mean that you won't be notified of other application crashes, and you'll have to manually check for issues using the Problem Reporting tool. If these notifications are important to you then I would not recommend turning off these pop-up notifications on application crashes.

(In this case, uncheck 'Show a message in a pop-up')

Hopefully this will be resolved at some point, but in the meantime I'll make a note and make an update if there is a better workaround.

[shahnawazshahin]

I've raised a ticket ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#11658.