I am using the Steam Flatpak on OpenSuse Tumbleweed and when using the Steam interface, specifically when I get a chat message or try to respond to one, the Steam UI will hard freeze, as in a I can’t type or move windows or interact with anything and then 30 seconds or so later everything goes back to normal. Plasma is still response when all of this is going on, it’s just the Steam UI that freezes.
It’s super odd and I have been running the Flatpak in the terminal to see if I can chat any relevant log messages but haven’t seen any yet. It’s been a little bit since I used the OpenSuse package and I think I remember seeing these freezes occasionally, but they seem much more common on the Flatpak version.
Anyone else get this behavior?
I don’t have an answer for you, but out of curiosity, is the freeze exactly 25 seconds? Because if so, it suggests that something is waiting for a dbus response that never arrives. Maybe a desktop portal request, for example. (The dbus timeout defaults to 25 seconds, IIRC.)
Also, while it’s frozen, you might want to check beneath all the open windows to see if a new window has appeared behind them. It’s possible that Steam opened a dialog box that’s waiting for you to respond to it, but it somehow didn’t get brought to the front.
I don’t have an answer for you, but out of curiosity, is the freeze exactly 25 seconds?
Possibly? How would I do some dbus debugging to confirm that?
Also, while it’s frozen, you might want to check beneath all the open windows to see if a new window has appeared behind them.
I don’t think this is it, because when the UI unfreezes I often move the window around because it goes into drag mode and don’t see anything behind it.
The freeze behaves like, I get a message and I open it to respond and maybe get a letter or 2 types before it just hard freezes.
How would I do some dbus debugging to confirm that?
man dbus-monitor
I would confirm that it’s 25 seconds first, to avoid a possible wild goose chase.
In case you don’t know, the main Steam issue tracker lives here:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/
…and the Steam Flatpak issue tracker lives here:
Did you set the correct permissions?
What permissions would I have to set?
How would permission affect freezes?
Yep. I had the exact same issue with steam flatpak on arch.
I installed “native’” steam via package manager and it doesn’t have this issue.
Maybe I will just go back to native, the flatpak stuff is pretty neat, but more useful on a distro with less up to date drivers and kernel.