Broken fonts in Steam — all characters appear as squares

Hello,

I haven’t found how to report a bug, so I’m posting this here.

I booted the Manjaro KDE 21.0.4-210506 live CD (sha1sum: 672592cff298f979e9969eaa4aa2ddf58a24f342). I was pleased to see that Steam is included out of the box. Unfortunately, when launching it (without installing anything or changing any system settings), every character in the UI appears as a square, rendering it unusable.

Screenshot

Haven’t installed the system, so I don’t know if this issue disappears after installation.

Hi @Linneris, and welcome!

I don’t think it’s a bug, so don’t worry 'bout it. It does, however, look as if the font’s not installed for you. Although, I wouldn’t know how or why that would be the case for a Live ISO because mine’s just absolutely fine!

I have absolutely no idea why this happens, but I suspect that working from a live ISO is the reason. I did a quick Google search and according to this page:

These commands should do the trick :

  • cd ~/.fonts/ (create the folder if it doesn’t exists)
  • wget https://support.steampowered.com/downloads/1974-YFKL-4947/SteamFonts.zip
  • unzip SteamFonts.zip && rm SteamFonts.zip

Other than that, I’d say don’t worry until it’s installed.

Hope this helps!

Maybe running Steam from Live USB is not possible as it uses the user folder, and the Live USB is not modifiable?