It's not a cardinal sin, it's called being a brave pioneer :)

Anyway, fwiw I've noticed something similar where steam just (re)starts all of a sudden while playing. Like I notice the game gets sluggish, then focus changes to the steam client, complete with the "new offerings" sale popup that comes when starting steam. And I did have steam overlay UI freeze completely recently but restarting the game and steam fixed it.

Kubuntu 22.04, X11, nVidia 3060 with 525 driver

Nope, but I sometimes feel that the Steam client uses more resources than the games 🤨

FWIW, no such issues here with AMD + Fedora (Nobara) + KDE. Using the normal Steam btw (not the Flatpak) + Proton-GE and an 8Bitdo Ultimate Bluetooth controller.

Maybe try a different DE? Like if you're using Gnome, give KDE a try. Also, what's your distro, because that makes a huge difference - like Ubuntu and it's variants in particular aren't really ideal for gaming, if you're using one of those.

No issues here (Wayland, Plasma, AMD). I’m not surprised that people are having this issue though, the Steam client is an absolute horrible mess.

rarely see steam crashing.

I'm on Pop and my Steam will randomly just restart sometimes. I have not found any rhyme or reason to it yet. And I'm NOT a linux expert by any sense of the word so not much I can do about it anyways.

I have similar issues running Gnome on AMD.

I have plain ol' Ubuntu LTS and I do not recall a Steam crash in a decade. Playing with Nvidia GPU on AMD Ryzen in recent years.

not even on wayland but it still craps out constantly. goes partly or completely black, or just won't come back after being minimized. games take forever to shut down and even afterwsrds steam shows its running. some games suddenly refuse to start and exiting steam causes it to hang and i have to kill it from resource monitor...