Steam On Linux Should Stop Crashing If No OpenGL Drivers Are Found

[billyswong]

If you have a dGPU, then it's probably because Steam is launching on the dGPU by default rather than the iGPU.

So there comes another issue, one usually want the *games* be launched on dGPU, but this is wasteful for the Steam client itself.

[Alexmitter]

Isn't it some electron or similar nonsense?

The steam client itself is written in the Source engine, yes seriously. The UI you see in Counterstrike Source or HL2, that is what the steam client uses as its base toolkit. But, it very rarely still uses it, most is now rendered in CEF embedded web views. That differs quite a bit from Electron. Electron is basically a locally running webapp with a Chrome window as the frontend and a NodeJS process as the backend. So two JS engines. Steam with CEF only uses JS on the frontend, the backend is good old native code.

[geerge]

If you have a dGPU, then it's probably because Steam is launching on the dGPU by default rather than the iGPU.

No dGPU, a 7840HS so a 780M. If I close steam with the x instead of the menu it keeps a dozen processes alive forever, and after a long play session a few days ago one steamwebhelper was pegged at 40% of a core until I killed it (no updates going on, just 1 small indie game installed on a fresh install). This screenshot is 5 minutes after opening steam then closing it as soon as it loaded, just the processes there's many dozen more threads spawned mostly idle. The worst offender was at 7% of a core 5 minutes ago, now it's at 15% seemingly climbing. Now I know to close steam differently but still, it's wasting battery life for no reason while playing the game.

[ms178]

As I am forced to use my old laptop with i915/R600 combination at the moment due to the sudden death of my beloved Haswell-Xeon system, it struck me that even basic tasks, such as opening the Steam client seems to no longer be possible. Steam complains about three Vulkan extensions that none of these GPUs support. Yes, that system is ancient and not great for gaming these days, but I'd like to still be able to enjoy my library of older games which used to work fine in an OpenGL-centric world. This is now blocked on missing Vulkan extensions by the launcher. That could be handled better, either with keeping the OpenGL path as a fallback, a CPU-based workaround or a Vulkan driver for the R600 GPU at least. While I've seen some Vulkan driver work for R600-hardware, that seems to be still far away to materialize in a Mesa release anytime soon.