Is anyone else having this issue. The only reason I really noticed it is because I use gnome DE and have Steam (Native) pinned to my dock and when I launch it it creates a new icon on my dock that says Steam (Runtime) and the Steam native icon doesn’t get the indicator on it that it is running. This was not the behavior until a few days ago when I applied my updates.
Prior to that update the behavior was as normally expected you would launch Steam (Native) and that would start and it’s indicator would light up and if I launched steam (Runtime) then it would launch and put its icon on the dock showing that it was running.
Sorry let me see if I can close this. Check out this thread that explains the issue.
TLDR is that it is launching the correct version native vs runtime, Gnome is just not displaying the correct icon because of the way Gnome does things which as this particular situation demonstrates is probably not the best way to do it but it’s Gnome so I wouldn’t hold my breath until they fix it or make it right lol.
The thing to consider is that both gnome and kde may not consider it a bug / issue even though I personally do. You have to look at what Steam (native) vs Steam (Runtime) .desktop files are actually doing. They are both running the same executable. The difference is Steam (native) is setting an environment variable to tell steam to use local libraries instead of the runtime libraries steam is providing. The issue with both DE environments is for whatever reason they are not keeping track of the .desktop file you are using to launch your application and instead are deciding what applications to show on the dock by correlating what .desktop file is running based on a matching name of the executable that is running and a .desktop file with the same name. I’m guessing maybe this was changed so that if you launch something from the terminal it would show the applicaiton on the dock perhaps? I really have no idea why both of them have now changed the logic of how they show what is running on the dock. So far Steam is the only program I have that has 2 .desktop files launching the same executable in different ways.