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Comment by Pannoniae | Hacker News Reader

To raise awareness: there's been a bug with the Linux Steam client which has been persistent for a long time.

TL;DR: if you have Steam running for more than a ~day or so, you will run out of window handles so you won't be able to open any new graphical application/window until you restart Steam.

Using Steam Chat appears to make the issue worse (it happens earlier).

This has been documented under https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/9094 but for some reason that issue has been closed.

I personally just restart Steam every day but if someone else encounters this issue and doesn't know why their windows are not opening, this is why :)

I am using KDE/Wayland but I've observed this under X11 too.

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KDE Wayland user here. I have never observed this issue myself, and I leave Steam running all the time (although I never open Steam Chat).

Although, not albeit.

You have a slave sentence there. These are incompatible with albeit.

Thanks, fixed! "Albeit" seemed like it would work, but "although" indeed fits much better.

To put it another way, albeit shouldn't be used with independent clauses.

1. I leave Steam running all the time (although I never open Steam Chat).

2. I leave Steam running all the time (albeit never with Steam Chat).

"I never open Steam Chat" can stand on its own as a sentence, but "never with Steam Chat" does not and thus can be appropriately modified with albeit.

I kinda wish HN allowed a visual indicator for subthreads that focus on tangents that don't hold universal appeal: comment grammar, humor, "why did I get downvoted?", etc.

There are lots of little discussions like this that I'd love to have, but which sometimes lead to a lot of downvotes.

I've got several Linux gaming machines (and a couple of business desktops I play FTL on sometimes), and it's weirdly inconsistent - the best and worst machine I have both use Intel Graphics. It almostnever shows up on the A770 - that one stays awake for weeks of daily gaming and I have no problems with it. My laptop with integrated Intel sees it all the time. My laptop with Nvidia graphics sees it often, but not nearly as often.

The one that's so annoying that I've actually developed habits around it is the tendency for the library window to freeze when it becomes unfocused - it's not all the time, but it's often enough that I now habitually close the window anytime I defocus it

Void Linux, xorg and never has this issue, often going many days without rebooting with Steam constantly open.

Interesting. I've left the Steam client running for weeks at a time and have not seen that issue. I bet it was closed because Valve couldn't replicate the problem.

If you actually look at the issue you can see it was closed because Valve shipped a fix and people confirmed it was fixed. Then later some other people reply that they still have problems but without any useful information.

This has made Steam something to avoid for me. I tried switching to Flatpak version to see if that would help, but unfortunately not. For me it started ~1 year ago.

The performance issues have made me not want to even open Steam anymore so I have nearly completely stopped playing. (not related to this issue but several games have also added kernel anticheats, killing off Linux versions, which also has contributed to this)

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