Good morning, so the other day I’ve had a odd problem occur - I’ve found my Gnome snap? completely spammed with Steam game icons. Pages and pages of them. I’ve yet to discover a way of removing them, let alone in bulk… short of uninstalling Steam and individual games?
Any suggestions, slightly irritating as some of my app’s are completely buried in various pages. Anyway to prevent this from happening in the first place?
Ubuntu Version:
Ubuntu 25.04
Cheers, James
I have this exact same issue on 24.04
@pug-ironfoot and @zedonk Welcome to Ubuntu Discourse 
Perhaps we can kill two issues with one topic?
Maybe…but generally speaking we prefer users open their own support topic to keep things neat and tidy.
That said, please confirm you are both using the GNOME desktop and both have installed Steam using the snap version.
Once we know this, we can hopefully move forward.
Thanks
Thanks for the replies - yes Gnome 48 and Steam is installed through Snap. Vanilla Ubuntu install. Cheers,
Hello @rubi1200 , I’m on GNOME 46 and running and running into the same issue.
In my case, it’s not just with Steam game but also with Youtube (I installed using the download button inside chrome’s url bar)
Welcome to Ubuntu Discourse
I am not sure what the best solution is for this issue.
Perhaps @James-Carroll can give some input.
Thanks
It’s difficult to explain this here, combining both the comments about Steam (snap) and Chrome together; I tried both on Gnome / 25.04 and don’t immediately notice any issues.
Whilst the Steam snap is sandboxed, it still writes its .desktop files to $HOME/.local/share/applications, same as Chrome, whereby you’d likely find duplicate entries in the system and by deleting the files you would remove the entries.
It could be worth then inspecting what’s in the contents of those files and comparing any differences for ideas what could be wrong; but also checking that there are infact duplicate files and this isn’t perhaps something going wrong in the Gnome shell rendering.
Ultimately I wouldn’t think there’s any immediate reason to suspect the snap packaging for Steam to be causing this specific error, because the underlying mechanism is basically unchanged from its native functioning, it’s hard to imagine what could be causing it though.
You may also want to clear out $HOME/.local/share/icons but if you browse that folder structure you’ll see it’s somewhat more effort to do by hand, probably easily done with Bash but I’ll let someone more skilled suggest how
Hi there, I had the same problem. When I went to HOME/.local/share/applications I found that there was a repeating folder for applications in there. Just delete that and the problem will be fixed.
Thanks worked for me!
Thanks @crazytrain2255
Out of curiosity, did anyone here happen to have Steam installed as an Apt package prior to using the snap or etc?
There is some logic that the snap would run in order to create a symbolic link between $SNAP_USER_COMMON/.local/share/applications and $SNAP_REAL_HOME/.local/share/applications (where “real home” is literally $HOME outside of the snap).
If there is a problem on the snap side causing this, it’s likely to exist in this section of the code:
(I’m a little doubtful however because desktop-launch is the common pattern for other snaps, yet most other snaps don’t have write access to this folder, so maybe confinement prevents issues normally but the lesser restrictions for Steam here bring something up? - alternatively it could be logic in Steam itself that gets confused - still the presence of the snaps own Github issues in those lines suggests it’s not entirely the “default” desktop-launch)
So it’d be worth reporting it upstream, but my casual glancing at that block of code right now can’t see any obvious errors. OTOH it’s Bash, and single characters often change logic dramatically without being obvious.
I can see from the screenshot above the second applications folder was a symlink, potentially to the same folder itself; and Gnome is likely rendering infinitely until a recursion limit is hit (possibly at the filesystem driver level) and prevents Steam taking over the entire shell, but it’s still a little vague to me how you’d get into that position to begin with.
Edit:
AI power go! Maybe, I’ll verify this when I’ve some more free time.
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The Steam Snap package has personal-files plugs that allow it to access the $HOME/.local/share/icons and $HOME/.local/share/applications folders, so that it can create the Steam .desktop files and icons in the correct locations.
Without access to these locations, the Steam Snap would function the same as the Flatpak version, which only creates the icons and .desktop files within its own HOME folder, which is not correct.
Previously, they tried to make this work in another way, by creating links from the .desktop files to the user’s applications folder, but this only happened after reopening the Steam Snap.
I suspect that this creation of links from inside the Steam Snap folder to the user’s folder may have caused this problem.
Now, instead of creating links from the inside out, the Steam Snap can access the folders and generate the icons and .desktop files directly in the correct place.
The links currently created are only for the Steam Snap to find the user’s folders, and not to create links within them.
@pug-ironfoot Did you happen to have a previous install of Steam (either via snap or deb) before encountering this problem? Is it new with an existing Steam snap install, or did it appear right after you installed the Steam snap?
No, clean install just through Snap. It had been fine for a couple of months afterwards before occurring. Cheers,
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