Currently Steam for Linux is only officially supported on Ubuntu. This means that Valve is only obligated to really provide support for Ubuntu systems running some flavor of version 12.04. Of course, this has not stopped almost every distribution from adopting Steam into their repositories and adapting the install and other scripts to work on other distributions. The performance on these distributions however, can sometimes be questionable.
Steam provides a runtime which is used for compatability accross a wide range of distributions, using libraries that are standardized to stay in line with Ubuntu 12.04. This allows systems running older libraries like old Stable distributions, and bleeding edge distributions with newer library versions to all run Steam with a similar experience: standardized library versions.
On many systems however (Debian, ArchLinux) the Steam runtime links to a version of gcc that can be outdated or provides less than optimal performance. To remedy this, a couple of files can be removed from the Steam runtime to cause the system to fall back on the native built ins, which are reported to provide increased performance. Some users even choose to go so far as to disable to runtime completely using STEAM_RUNTIME=0, making Steam run entirely on native libraries.
steam-wrapper is a generic bash script which attempts to remove the stale or outdated gcc libraries and then passes relevant arguments to run Steam. It provides an easy way to set the runtime and other variables for Steam. And although it is purely made for convenience, because it may help those who were unaware of library issues or other conflicts, I have decided to post it on GitHub under the name pyamsoft/steam-wrapper. It may help you, it may not.
If for any reason you are experiencing problems with Steam and wish to restore the runtime to its default state and not have to reinstall all of steam and your games, you can launch Steam from the command line like this:
steam --reset
which will reset the runtime back to the default.
Woohoo!
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