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

I 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.

I 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 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.

Even 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.

I 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.

Wasn'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

I 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

I 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.

I 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

Wasn'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.

I 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

Ha, that's when liveCDs come into play :) Speaking of grub, it should be lunch time....

I thought this problem was on my end so I've been using Big Picture instead till I get around to fixing it. Thanks!

Can't say I've hit this problem. I might be in a sweet spot based on when I run updates. Nice to see the news, though, in case I run into it.

Funny but also sad that we started defending Arch before anyone even attacked. Arch is popular enough. We don't need to evangelize! It won't be cool anymore if it's mainstream!

Started Steam today. Got the black screen.
Switching to Beta fixed Steam for me, as expected.

First rule of Arch Linux, tell everyone you use Arch Linux:
And as for the discussion on Arch. Been using it for years, after using several other distro's. Besides the detailed documentation, Arch let's me install ONLY the software I want from scratch, and yet still WORKS (including up-to-date software). Haven't found a better distro for personal use, but always open to suggestions. :)


Last edited by Oet_ on 4 September 2021 at 12:43 pm UTC

Just noticed I have a steam update waiting, and tested it. Release notes in the updater show up again. That is with Steam beta on Kubuntu. Just in case someone still reading this :)

Manjaro (Stable) got updated and now has this problem, Steam Beta fixed it, so thanks for the heads up:)

Thanks for the warning, I was about to update too, I just left the freetype2 ; I will update it when things will be sorted out

The "regression" is all Steam, not Arch. It's not even freetype that was (still is, on non-beta) the problem, it was their own stupidly bundled libharfbuzz in steam-runtime-heavy and linux runtime soldier. See, the new freetype is no longer compatible with the old harfbuzz API. This is Valve's mistake... what do they think is going to happen? System freetype, old bundled harfbuzz. That's even a circular dependency, freetype linked against harfbuzz, harfbuzz linked against freetype.

The clue was this:

steamwebhelper: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6: undefined symbol: hb_ot_tags_from_script_and_language

That's a harfbuzz symbol. Note that with later beta clients updates, it didn't print this error anywhere on console, so I was lucky to get this clue when the problem first surfaced.

I had upgraded to freetype 2.11 long before Arch did. I keep my systems binary compatible because I compile some things to run on all my systems, so when my other systems (LFS, Slackware) get an upgrade for something like that, all do.

I tried forcing Steam to load my libharfbuzz with LD_PRELOAD and it worked for the UI and the client worked correctly, but bombed out on Proton because it was being overridden in the runtime soldier bwrap container.

So what I ended up doing was dropping in the previous libfreetype.so.6 from my freetype 2.10.4 package and setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH. That worked until Valve finally fixed it with a somewhat newer libharfbuzz (from Dec. 2019 lol... they are still trying to support old Ubuntu) and probably a recompile of the embedded Chrome.

Also note, it was only the 64 bit parts of Steam that had this problem. I used lsof to help me solve this problem and Steam was correctly hooking both lib32-freetype and lib32-harfbuzz from /usr/lib32 and the Steam client does not bundle them.

I think that everyone using Steam on Linux should be using the beta client (to ensure the latest proton bits etc.) but anyone not, that wants to fix this, instead of downgrading freetype, could simply stick their previous libfreetype.so.6 (copy the real library and rename or symlink) to a directory that doesn't have any other libraries and start Steam with "LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/directory steam" or better yet, to the wrapper script used to start it (e.g. /usr/bin/steam), "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/directory" which is how I did it.


Last edited by Grogan on 6 September 2021 at 11:41 pm UTC

Otherwise, short version: if they are going to package one library and leave it old, they should package the other libraries that they depend on.... or just use the system libraries... who would have thought that was a thing?

Is there a way to set up this manually?
steam settings seems to not be available on my menu for some weird reason.
!steam settings

Is there a way to set up this manually?
steam settings seems to not be available on my menu for some weird reason.
!steam settings

Family Control enabled maybe?
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/154644928861005330/