Hello everyone, Fedora noob here (First time, coming from different distro’s) and trying to install Steam. I installed it throught the Software store, using RPM Fusion. When launching, i have the ability to log in, but once logged in steam never starts. I can see it trying to boot (Logo appearing in the activate program, it capturing mouse focus) and it gets stuck in this loop until killed manually. Sometimes i get an error about steamwebhelper crashing. When i use “STEAM_RUNTIME=1 steam” from the terminal, it does start. So it seems like an issue with the desktop environment? Any help is appreciated!
Open terminal
Start steam with just a straight steam command - you’ll see a pile of messages scroll by.
If steam fails to start normally then post and paste the last 50 or so lines of output from the output, which hopefully shows a crash or a failure of some sort.
You don’t say if you’re using KDE or Gnome, but with KDE as an example, the program is started with nothing more than a straight call to /usr/bin/steam so running this from the terminal should be identical.
If you find that you must set the STEAM_RUNTIME variable, you can just plug this in the start menu entry just as you did within the console.
Hey, thanks for your reply. To clarify, I am using GNOME. It was the default when I installed Fedora. When I just run the steam command, I don’t get any output, just a newline. That’s why I’ve been having such a hard time debugging this issue, haha.
You could try launching steam again with journalctl -f going in another terminal and see if it spits anything of note out there, but here are some other things to try quickly:
- If you haven’t, try restarting your computer and see if it launches.
- If it does, close it and try to open it again and see if it goes back to the crashing behavior.
If 2 happens, it’s likely the issue the RPM version of Steam has with getting confused with your integrated vs. dedicated graphics. If you only use your dedicated graphics, you can most likely disable the integrated graphics via the bios to prevent this from happening.
Do you have integrated graphics on a CPU by any chance? I had this exact same issue. It can sometimes be solved by changing a flag in steam.desktop to usedefaultgpu=true to usedefaultgpu=false. I solved this issue personally across several different Linux distributions, by simply disabling my iGPU from the Bios when it detects a dGPU is installed. If you don’t have an iGPU at all then it’s probably not the same issue. Sounds like it though.
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Nothing at all when you open a terminal and call steam? Zero output?
I’d expect at least something. For example:
┌─🎩 lurcher share/flatpak/exports
├─
└─➜ steam ⏱️ 28s 16:39 Sun 19-Oct
steam.sh[56102]: Running Steam on fedora 42 64-bit
steam.sh[56102]: STEAM_RUNTIME is enabled automatically
setup.sh[56154]: Steam runtime environment up-to-date!
steam.sh[56102]: Log already open
steam.sh[56102]: Steam client's requirements are satisfied
CProcessEnvironmentManager is ready, 6 preallocated environment variables.
[2025-10-19 18:11:44] Startup - updater built Oct 3 2025 02:26:15
[2025-10-19 18:11:44] Startup - Steam Client launched with: '/home/steve/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam' '-srt-logger-opened'
10/19 18:11:44 minidumps folder is set to /tmp/dumps
etc.
etc.
Logs should be in ~/.steam/steam/logs/console-linux.txt. They may be large (mine is 6.6 MB right now).
You might want to rm this file, run steam once more, and then see what you get in there.
Alternatively, if you’re OK reading logging messages then feel free to zip to the bottom of the log and see what it tells you.
There actually was zero output from the steam command. I used journalctl and it gave me the logs, which seemed to contain a dependency error between Mesa and Steam and it segfaulting.
I switched to flatpak which solved my issue. If anyone is willing to look deeper into why Rpm Fusion doesn’t work, I can share logs. 
Thanks everyone
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That’s the thing - I’m using KDE, mesa 25.2.4 and steam from rpm and it’s working without any issues. If you’re happy with the flatpak, fair enough though.