I had a mild annoyance when trying to browse the Steam store on multiple machines. The screen was just blank. I didn’t do anything about it immediately because I could browse the store on Firefox. What was also weird is that although the Community and my user page were also blank, the library was not.
I took this as a sign that I need to play the games I have, not purchase anything new. Steam was telling me something, or maybe it was openSUSE? or KDE Plasma? I couldn’t say but after a few days of doing updates, I decided it was time to figure it out.
Access to my Library was not affected by whatever bug was presenting.
According to this Reddit page, https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/kx4igt/steam_borked_since_one_of_the_last_updates/ , it appears to be some sort of issue with GPU accelerated web content. I find this to be rather concerning as I think in 2024, we are well beyond this being an issue. The fix for this is just toggling an option and restarting Steam.
Settings > Interface > Enable GPU accelerated rendering in web views (requires restart)
Locate this option in the list and disable it.
After a restart everything is back to “normal” and the Steam store works just like you would expect.
Now, I can more easily spend money on Steam, once again…. because…. that is something I need to do…
Final Thoughts
I don’t know where the problem exists that broke GPU rendering for the web content, I don’t know if it was a new feature that just happened to break upon its deployment. For all I know it could be an issue with the way my system is set up… and the others that have Steam but it did not affect the SteamDeck.
Yet another problem solved and now something else to look out for in the future. Thankfully, there are a lot of options for tweaking so many things in Steam, Linux, and of course openSUSE to allow you to tweak the software to work best with your hardware. Linux is fun and in a way, this was fun to figure out too.
References
SteamDeck reference on CubicleNate.com
https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/kx4igt/steam_borked_since_one_of_the_last_updates/ (for as long as this link is good)