Steam not working right on Arch Linux? It's an issue with FreeType and there's a fix

Quoting: RaabenI kinda brace myself since some people love to point fingers at things like this and claim that Arch is a bad/buggy/difficult distro. I ran it for many years and something big like this happened maybe once or twice a year and always had a simple fix; it's darn solid. I am pretty sure I had more problems with my distro of choice's last upgrade than my entire Arch days..

I don't know Arch but tu put things into perspective, i'm using Debian, and they have broken grub two times this two last years (on stable), leaving users who have updated at the wrong time with an unbootable device without any warning (have to use another install or live cd, and reinstall grub on the disk).
Of course, this problem has been spotted in derivatives (Ubuntu, Mint...)
So yeah... sh** happens, even on the most stable distros (and on Windows too, of course).


Last edited by DebianUser on 2 September 2021 at 12:21 pm UTC

I don't want to downgrade and instead tried Big Picture Mode, works too.

Quoting: DebianUser

Quoting: RaabenI kinda brace myself since some people love to point fingers at things like this and claim that Arch is a bad/buggy/difficult distro. I ran it for many years and something big like this happened maybe once or twice a year and always had a simple fix; it's darn solid. I am pretty sure I had more problems with my distro of choice's last upgrade than my entire Arch days..

I don't know Arch but tu put things into perspective, i'm using Debian, and they have broken grub two times this two last years (on stable), leaving users who have updated at the wrong time with an unbootable device without any warning (have to use another install or live cd, and reinstall grub on the disk).
Of course, this problem has been spotted in derivatives (Ubuntu, Mint...)
So yeah... sh** happens, even on the most stable distros (and on Windows too, of course).

Huh, do you have something weird there? I've been running stable for decades, and haven't had grub break. Also, I mean why would you reboot unless you've updated the kernel? :P

Quoting: denyasis

Quoting: slaapliedjeI'm not sure they've actually said such things, or we've just assumed that's what they'll do, because it'd be madness otherwise.

Lol. I don't see anyine saying Arch is buggy here. Obviously because Arch didn't break. Steam did. It's on them to fix it. Could have been any distro. That's what testing is for.

Quoting: GuestEven if Valve use their own repos, issues can still happen

Agreed, but that's on Valve to fix it. They are promising a console like experience after all.

Wasn't this in the FreeType2 package, where the break was? Also, I'm pretty sure Valve doesn't package Steam for Arch... or do they? They didn't used to at least. The Steam package in Arch always made me think it was the weirdest one, as it seemed to be the only one that creates icons for both the Native and Runtime ones and I've never quite understood what the difference is. Always seemed to me, one worked and the other didn't.

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: DebianUser

Quoting: RaabenI kinda brace myself since some people love to point fingers at things like this and claim that Arch is a bad/buggy/difficult distro. I ran it for many years and something big like this happened maybe once or twice a year and always had a simple fix; it's darn solid. I am pretty sure I had more problems with my distro of choice's last upgrade than my entire Arch days..

I don't know Arch but tu put things into perspective, i'm using Debian, and they have broken grub two times this two last years (on stable), leaving users who have updated at the wrong time with an unbootable device without any warning (have to use another install or live cd, and reinstall grub on the disk).
Of course, this problem has been spotted in derivatives (Ubuntu, Mint...)
So yeah... sh** happens, even on the most stable distros (and on Windows too, of course).

Huh, do you have something weird there? I've been running stable for decades, and haven't had grub break. Also, I mean why would you reboot unless you've updated the kernel? :P

I'm not sure if DebianUser is thinking of the same bugs as I, but there where a couple of bugs over the last years where grub broke for some users.

One was if you were running a system without udev. Another where you ended up with an unbootable system if you upgraded grub non-interactively with an unknowingly broken configuration.

Both quite esoteric cases fortunately.

Quoting: slaapliedjeWasn't this in the FreeType2 package, where the break was?

My understanding was the opposite, but I must admit I could be wrong. I'm self taught, so I could be reading it the wrong way, but I figure if Valve has to patch Steam to work, it's likely not a Free type bug, right?

Edit: Looking at the github again, it appears Valve was shipping steam with libraries that were too out of date. Am I reading that right?


Last edited by denyasis on 2 September 2021 at 6:03 pm UTC

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: DebianUser

Quoting: RaabenI kinda brace myself since some people love to point fingers at things like this and claim that Arch is a bad/buggy/difficult distro. I ran it for many years and something big like this happened maybe once or twice a year and always had a simple fix; it's darn solid. I am pretty sure I had more problems with my distro of choice's last upgrade than my entire Arch days..

I don't know Arch but tu put things into perspective, i'm using Debian, and they have broken grub two times this two last years (on stable), leaving users who have updated at the wrong time with an unbootable device without any warning (have to use another install or live cd, and reinstall grub on the disk).
Of course, this problem has been spotted in derivatives (Ubuntu, Mint...)
So yeah... sh** happens, even on the most stable distros (and on Windows too, of course).

Huh, do you have something weird there? I've been running stable for decades, and haven't had grub break. Also, I mean why would you reboot unless you've updated the kernel? :P

I think only users who have make an update at the wrong time have seen the issue (i hope the bug has been fixed rapidly, as reinstalling grub on the disk was sufficient).
But searching the web for a solution, i found other users with the problem, and one who has stated it was the second time (and it was for me too).
I don't remember the first issue, but the second is here https://www.google.com/search?q=grub_malloc+grub+update&source=lmns&bih=1013&biw=2144&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiKz9jFqeLyAhUI3OAKHXTDCVEQ_AUoAHoECAEQAA

Since that, i keep a old non-updated install on a small partition on another disk, with grub on it, to have another grub/install for rescue, if the same problem happens, i just boot this system, chroot into my main system, and reinstall grub on the main disk.

I must shut down my computer because it is in the same room than my bed :p


Last edited by DebianUser on 3 September 2021 at 8:03 am UTC

Quoting: DebianUser

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: DebianUser

Quoting: RaabenI kinda brace myself since some people love to point fingers at things like this and claim that Arch is a bad/buggy/difficult distro. I ran it for many years and something big like this happened maybe once or twice a year and always had a simple fix; it's darn solid. I am pretty sure I had more problems with my distro of choice's last upgrade than my entire Arch days..

I don't know Arch but tu put things into perspective, i'm using Debian, and they have broken grub two times this two last years (on stable), leaving users who have updated at the wrong time with an unbootable device without any warning (have to use another install or live cd, and reinstall grub on the disk).
Of course, this problem has been spotted in derivatives (Ubuntu, Mint...)
So yeah... sh** happens, even on the most stable distros (and on Windows too, of course).

Huh, do you have something weird there? I've been running stable for decades, and haven't had grub break. Also, I mean why would you reboot unless you've updated the kernel? :P

I think only users who have make an update at the wrong time have seen the issue (i hope the bug has been fixed rapidly, as reinstalling grub on the disk was sufficient).
But searching the web for a solution, i found other users with the problem, and one who has stated it was the second time (and it was for me too).
I don't remember the first issue, but the second is here https://www.google.com/search?q=grub_malloc+grub+update&source=lmns&bih=1013&biw=2144&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiKz9jFqeLyAhUI3OAKHXTDCVEQ_AUoAHoECAEQAA

Since that, i keep a old non-updated install on a small partition on another disk, with grub on it, to have another grub/install for rescue, if the same problem happens, i just boot this system, chroot into my main system, and reinstall grub on the main disk.

I must shut down my computer because it is in the same room than my bed :p

Speaking of rescue modes... I am going to give a shout out to Red Hat here. I was playing around with RHEL 8 in a VM to see how it stood up as a desktop / workstation. I did something and then probably shut down before it had finished, so it was in a weird state. But yet choosing the rescue mode from the command line would boot up a full Gnome desktop! I was quite impressed.

Turns out I was playing with enabling fips mode, and it had gone a little sideways, and I just needed to run the command again so it could finish that. But I thought the rescue mode having a sort of 'snapshot' to get a bootable system with full GUI was quite impressive.

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: DebianUser

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: DebianUser

Quoting: RaabenI kinda brace myself since some people love to point fingers at things like this and claim that Arch is a bad/buggy/difficult distro. I ran it for many years and something big like this happened maybe once or twice a year and always had a simple fix; it's darn solid. I am pretty sure I had more problems with my distro of choice's last upgrade than my entire Arch days..

I don't know Arch but tu put things into perspective, i'm using Debian, and they have broken grub two times this two last years (on stable), leaving users who have updated at the wrong time with an unbootable device without any warning (have to use another install or live cd, and reinstall grub on the disk).
Of course, this problem has been spotted in derivatives (Ubuntu, Mint...)
So yeah... sh** happens, even on the most stable distros (and on Windows too, of course).

Huh, do you have something weird there? I've been running stable for decades, and haven't had grub break. Also, I mean why would you reboot unless you've updated the kernel? :P

I think only users who have make an update at the wrong time have seen the issue (i hope the bug has been fixed rapidly, as reinstalling grub on the disk was sufficient).
But searching the web for a solution, i found other users with the problem, and one who has stated it was the second time (and it was for me too).
I don't remember the first issue, but the second is here https://www.google.com/search?q=grub_malloc+grub+update&source=lmns&bih=1013&biw=2144&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiKz9jFqeLyAhUI3OAKHXTDCVEQ_AUoAHoECAEQAA

Since that, i keep a old non-updated install on a small partition on another disk, with grub on it, to have another grub/install for rescue, if the same problem happens, i just boot this system, chroot into my main system, and reinstall grub on the main disk.

I must shut down my computer because it is in the same room than my bed :p

Speaking of rescue modes... I am going to give a shout out to Red Hat here. I was playing around with RHEL 8 in a VM to see how it stood up as a desktop / workstation. I did something and then probably shut down before it had finished, so it was in a weird state. But yet choosing the rescue mode from the command line would boot up a full Gnome desktop! I was quite impressed.

Turns out I was playing with enabling fips mode, and it had gone a little sideways, and I just needed to run the command again so it could finish that. But I thought the rescue mode having a sort of 'snapshot' to get a bootable system with full GUI was quite impressive.

Yeah rescue mode is pretty helpful in some cases... but not when updates are breaking grub itself :s

Quoting: denyasis

Quoting: slaapliedjeWasn't this in the FreeType2 package, where the break was?

My understanding was the opposite, but I must admit I could be wrong. I'm self taught, so I could be reading it the wrong way, but I figure if Valve has to patch Steam to work, it's likely not a Free type bug, right?

Edit: Looking at the github again, it appears Valve was shipping steam with libraries that were too out of date. Am I reading that right?

Oh maybe? Valve definitely needs to walk a fine line between compatible with older Linux set ups vs using newer libraries. Though as it's mostly using it's own static libraries within it's own tree (separate from if it's sandboxed by flatpak/snap, which causes other strange issues) then it should remain fairly compatible. I thought the problem in this case was that Arch had a new Freetype2 lib, and it's one that Steam does use from the system, and there was some compatibility issue there, so they had to update their package either to include it's own freetype library or make it work with the system's. But then I only read the summary here, and didn't go digging into their github.