Valve's beta fixes Steam's alt-tab freeze and closes the case, but one game still hangs

Valve's beta Steam client now carries a fix for the overlay bug that freezes Linux games on alt-tab, and the report behind it was closed as completed on October 17. A follow-up filed two and a half hours later says the deadlock is still there on the fixed build, and the fix is in the Preview and Beta channel only.

The October 13 client is still the newest public release, and the one owners date the freeze to. Image: Valve

Valve's beta client note of October 16 says "Fixed Vulkan games hanging after alt-tab", and that is the whole of what Valve has published about it. Issue 13682 was closed on Valve's own tracker at 16:44 UTC, three and a half hours after the owner who filed it said the beta had cleared the freeze on his machine.

The public client has not moved since the October 13 release that began warning desktop Linux users about Proton, so anyone running stable Steam still has the freeze.

Valve asked for a new report, and got one

The request to retest landed on the issue itself at 01:44 UTC on October 17: "The latest steam beta should have a fix for this issue, can you update to the latest beta client and check if it is fixed on your side?" The original reporter answered at 13:12 UTC that the beta had fixed it for him, and asked whether to leave the issue open for everyone else.

By then two owners had tested the same beta build and disagreed. One reported the freeze gone across Valheim, Project Zomboid and the first Slay the Spire; another reported Slay the Spire 2 still hanging to a black screen on Ubuntu 26.04. The issue was closed anyway, with an instruction: "For those of you still experiencing problems, please open a new issue and please include your steam logs as specified by the issue template."

That new issue exists. Issue 13766 was filed at 19:19 UTC on October 17 and says Slay the Spire 2 still hangs at launch on beta build 1792192922, with the game's main thread stuck waiting on the overlay helper's socket and all four of the helper's own threads parked, ignoring a polite kill signal.

The trigger the reporter describes is narrow rather than general: a launch hangs when the previous run of the same game had the overlay switched on and exited normally. Restarting Steam between the two runs does not clear it, logging out of the desktop session does, and switching the overlay off for the game avoids it, which is one owner's testing of one game on one machine.

All five test launches in the follow-up report used the game's native Linux build, not Proton. Image: Mega Crit

Eight reports now sit behind one line of patch notes

When we reported the merges on October 17, Valve had folded four reports together, named no cause, no build and no known-issues note, and left both of the reports it was reading open. There is a patch note now, and a closure, and twice as many reports behind them.

The four we reported were 13714, 13738, 13740 and Proton 10265, which was closed into the client tracker three minutes after it was filed. Four more have joined them: 13744 and 13749 on October 16, the Diablo II: Resurrected report 13765 on October 17, and 13709 itself, the second of the two original reports, closed into 13682 at 01:51 UTC that morning.

13709 did not stay closed. Valve reopened it at 12:49 UTC the same day and dropped its duplicate marking, so one of the two founding reports is open again while the other carries a completed label.

Valheim is among the games owners reported freezing on alt-tab, and among the three a tester cleared on the beta. Image: Iron Gate AB

Valve still has not said what broke

The patch note names Vulkan games and alt-tab, and stops there. It does not name 13682, the assertion string the issue is now titled after, or the overlay helper process that every owner's trace points at, so the fix has been published and the cause has not, and neither has a build number.

For anyone who would rather not run a beta client, the workaround from the original thread is unchanged: switch the Steam overlay off for the game, and lose screenshots and recording with it. The newest public release is still Steam Client Update: October 13th.