Steam is not working (steamwebhelper is not responding)

Ask Fedora
1

I know I just made a post about Steam a few minutes ago, but that one was about an install error, now I have a different launch error… I thought it wouldn’t be noticed if I just comment to the previous post, so I’m sorry.

anyway, the errors.
when I tried to launch Steam, I managed to log in, but the main Steam window never loaded, even after I tried to open it manually. I tried to restart Steam. This time nothing happened for several minutes, then it gave me an error window, which told me that steamwebhelper is not responding, and suggested to restart Steam with different options, or to exit Steam. Then the error window itself started to freeze a bit.

the errors I just described now persist with every Steam launch. If I choose the “Restart” option, it all repeats. If I choose “Ignore”, then the Steam icon appears in my dock once in 2 minutes, without any actual app window, and disappears after a few seconds.
I’m not sure what’s wrong.

the way I installed Steam is just sudo dnf install steam (I didn’t think I needed to do anything else since I enabled 3rd party repositories after instlling Fedora, and noticed one called “nonfree-something-steam” in there).

after seeing the errors I described, I tried to sudo dnf remove steam, then I followed Fedora’s Steam install cli guide. Here are the exact commands I used:

sudo dnf install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm -y
sudo dnf5 config-manager setopt fedora-cisco-openh264.enabled=1
sudo dnf install steam -y

but even after doing that, the same errors pesisted. Steam is still unusable.

how do I fix this?..

as a side note, after enabling the rpm fusion free and nonfree repositories, sudo dnf upgrade for some reason wanted to replace unrar 0.3.1-1.fc41 from fedora repo with unrar 7.0.7-2.fc41 from rpmfusion-nonfree repo… I hope nothing is wrong here, because I proceeded with that.

2

On a recent install of steam I found that launching steam for the first time is very slow. Steam must do some self-configuration and download a lot of updates as part of that so just the first launch is very slow.

I would reboot (steam remains running and every time you launch a new attempt it creates more conflicts) which will kill all versions of steam that may still be running, then launch steam once and wait for it to finish the config and open the first window. It may take a considerable time but that is normal for the first time it is launched.

I also just did a clean install of steam on f41
The first time it was launched it showed that the steamwebhelper crashed and then the main window crashed and I was back to a login screen.
Reopening steam then worked properly.

3

I see, thank you. I’ll try to do that. Is there a way to make SURE to remove every trace of Steam from my computer? Or is sudo dnf remove steam enough? (I’m trying to make sure to get rid of the existing configurations that probably got ruined, as I already opened and closed Steam a lot of times without waiting, including killing the processes with the system monitor)
also asking this because on my previous Linux systems, after uninstalling Steam through the package manager, and then installing it again, it logged me into my account right away without the password, so I guess there have to be some bits of Steam left somewhere even after uninstall…

4

well… what I just did is, I uninstalled Steam, I deleted every Steam folder from the home directory, I then installed Steam again, restarted my computer (just to clear RAM and swap), launched Steam once… it had a few configuration and update downloading windows, but after that, it was the Steamwebhelper crash window, and there is no main window at all, several minutes already. (it’s different from what you’re describing, because you said you had a main window and then it crashed.)
I’m not sure what to do here.

5

Not sure if you have a similar configuration to me, but I have a dual gpu system and it does this on a new install. To resolve it edit /usr/share/applications/steam.desktop

  • comment out the 2 discrete lines
    • #PrefersNonDefaultGPU=true
    • #X-KDE-RunOnDiscreteGpu=true

Log out/back in try again. Be aware you might need to add DRI_PRIME=1 %command% to some games to get them to use the correct GPU.