If you're using Arch Linux or anything based on it (or other rolling update distributions) and you've recently run updates that included freetype2, you might unfortunately notice that Steam is now quite broken.
When loading any part of the Steam client that depends on web views, it will just give you a rather unhelpful black screen. This is obviously a big problem and makes it all quite unusable. So what can you do? Well, if you're comfortable with your package managing you could downgrade freetype2 back to version 2.10.4 but that can then end up breaking future updates that depend on the newer version. Valve are hot on the issue though and they've already put up a fresh Steam Beta with a fix.
Valve contractor Timothee Besset commented on GitHub to say it's "Today's beta update comes with a fairly significant change to the way we setup the runtime environment for the web views. Please test that this addresses the issue on all affected distributions!". So if you're seeing the black-screen issues, try out the latest Steam Beta. Doing so is easy by just loading up Steam settings and then look for the red boxed area shown below:
Arch Linux does at times have issues like this, because updates are constantly rolling so issues end up being found much quicker - which also means by the time other distributions upgrade (like Ubuntu every 6 months) the issues are likely solved by then.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
pskosinski Sep 8, 2021
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..Lucky you. I run Arch for a few years and it crashes seriously about once a week. Seriously as in: I'm not able to connect to network, run X or run a kernel at all.
Last edited by pskosinski on 8 September 2021 at 12:05 am UTC
I hope someone can help me with this issue, I'd be really grateful.
Thank you for this article and for the work you'd keep doing always :).
Receive a huge, sincere, fresh & virtual hug, as well as my best desires ^^.
Quoting: TakuyaI just received a new update of Steam Client just now, I got the black screen. I thought that this meant I was ready to update Freetype2, to my surprise, after the self update when launching Steam Client, appeared as a package update. After update every package, it keeps showing the black screen :(.You should report it here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues
I hope someone can help me with this issue, I'd be really grateful.
Thank you for this article and for the work you'd keep doing always :).
Receive a huge, sincere, fresh & virtual hug, as well as my best desires ^^.
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