Steam compares its installed files against its manifest at every start and
restores whatever differs, which is why its launcher entry carries
-noverifyfiles. The entry in ~/.config/autostart never got it: it points at
/usr/bin/steam, a shell script, so it fell through the Chromium filter in
mca_autostart_apply and was left alone.
A Steam started at login therefore verified, found the web helper script 46
bytes larger than the manifest says, restored it, and the path unit patched
it straight back - an update dialog that begins again every few seconds and
never finishes. The same client started from the menu was fine, which is
what made it look like a problem of Steam's own.
The autostart entry now carries the switch as well. It follows the Steam
setting rather than the autostart one, because leaving it out while Steam is
patched is exactly what causes the loop.
That covers the entry that exists; a terminal or a script still starts Steam
without the switch. So the patch no longer fights back either: a script that
was patched before, is not patched now, and belongs to a client that is
still running has just been restored by Steam, and doing it again would only
have the two of them undoing each other. It waits for the next apply with
Steam closed - the helper is started once, at the start, so patching it now
would not have helped that session anyway.
Also: Steam does not checksum that script, it compares sizes - the log says
"Verifying file sizes only" - while the comments and the documentation
claimed otherwise. And the status screen now tells a patch that is waiting
from one that is missing, instead of reporting both as not patched yet.
"Apply now" had nothing to do in the normal case. Enabling applies, the
watcher handles everything installed afterwards, and the settings and
applications screens apply on their way out - so pressing it answered
"already applied to 14 applications" and that was the whole interaction.
It is now "Re-apply everything": the state is taken back and written again
from scratch. That is the answer to the question the status block can raise
but nothing could act on - Steam showing as not patched after a client
update, an application that drifted, a flag file edited by hand.
Uninstalling an application used to leave the entry shadowing it behind, in
the user home where the package manager cannot see it, offering to start a
program that is gone. A plain apply only looks at what exists now, so the
watcher never noticed either. Those are removed on every apply now, not just
when rebuilding.
A list of names reads like a compatibility list, invites the question of
whether the one you care about is on it, and is out of date the moment
something new turns up. The point is that there is no list: every launcher
is examined and the Chromium-based ones are identified by what they ship.
A desktop entry that already lives in ~/.local/share/applications is the
user's own file, patched in place with the original kept aside. It used to
get the same X-MCA-Generated marker as a shadow copy, which made the next
scan skip it, fall back to the system entry, and overwrite the user's file
with a shadow - and then delete it on revert instead of restoring it.
The two cases now carry different markers. Only a shadow is skipped by the
scan and deleted when undoing; an entry patched in place stays in the scan
and is restored from its backup.
Also: resolve the applications screen's labels once instead of per row per
keypress, and drop code nothing calls.
Middle-click autoscroll for every Chromium-based application on the system:
Electron and CEF applications, Chromium-based browsers, Flatpaks, Spotify and
Steam, plus anything installed later.
The flag goes into an Arch wrapper's <name>-flags.conf where one exists, and
into a shadowing desktop entry where it does not. Steam gets its web helper
script patched and -noverifyfiles on its launcher, because it restores its own
files otherwise. Every change is recorded so it can be taken back exactly.
Felitendo