Steam is broken for me. It says it is running in system tray, but cannot pull up Steam

[tiny fulcrum]

I have uninstalled Steam and reinstalled and nothing is working.

all i did was turn the PC on today.

steam is showing it is running the back ground. i have no idea wtf is wrong

i have no steam flatpak installed yet still cannot purge system of Steam to reinstall it

i did sudo apt purge --autoremove steam and its telling me there is still Steam in my home

i completly removed Steam and reinstalled and it is STILL running in background but not displaying

right now, Steam only works if i type Steam into terminal

[still yacht]

optional: if you want to full kill steam
sudo apt install kate

touch killsteam.sh ; kate killsteam.sh

#!/bin/sh
kill -9 steam
killall steam
kill -9 steamwebhelper
killall steamwebhelper
kill -9 fossilize_replay
killall fossilize_replay```save `ctrl` `s`
`chmod +x killsteam.sh`
`./killsteam.sh`

then after open a new terminal
> `ctrl` `alt` `t`
then
> `steam`
in terminal

[reef sluice]

The system package is just a shim that installs the binary to home

Uninstalling it isn't expected to delete steam from your home

[still yacht]

uninstalling software works a bit different with linux

[reef sluice]

Also Uninstalling software on Linux doesn't stop the binary running in memory

[still yacht]

if you used apt remove or apt uninstall will still keep files around
apt purge whatever uninstalls + folders/configs

[reef sluice]

Don't use the flatpak

[still yacht]

you can check

xdg-open $HOME/.steam/steam

iirc flatpak is

xdg-open $HOME/.var/app

[reef sluice]

Do start by forcibly killing it in your system monitor and just starting it again

[still yacht]

with flatpak listing installed packages is just

flatpak list

[reef sluice]

If you find steam broken and need to refresh it shut it down and run steam --reset

[still yacht]

also common directory paths
<#1050504228029874206 message>

for refreshing steam usually it was

steam --reset

[reef sluice]

This is virtually the only thing on Linux you will ever fix by reinstalling stuff

[still yacht]

also thats just common
steam installs into

~/.steam/steam
and (depends on package)
~/.local/share/Steam
flatpak is
~/.var/app

[reef sluice]

@still yacht thanks didn't know that option

I have run into a case where the client borked itself for no reason discernable

[still yacht]

sometimes just

killall steamwebhelper
and it'll loop itself to bring the client backup

steamwebhelper in a nutshell is chromium tabs

but is this a firstime steam install and hasnt got with steam runtimes? during the install?

[still yacht]

though since its running on those pid's if you want to kill it
pkill -9 11580
pkill -9 16421
pkill -9 11364