What a pile. All it is is a web browser. That’s pretty much it. And a poor one at that.
Instant beefs:
- It installs games as hidden files not applications.
- It runs a process named ‘ipcserver’ that remains alive after you quit the client.
- The UI is non/sub-standard.
- It doesn’t clean up after itself if you relaunch after force quitting it which then prevents it from starting* (though the ‘ipcserver’ seems to have no trouble starting).
To overcome that last item (which throws an error stating “steam engine instance already exists”) you have to manually remove a couple of files from /private/tmp. In Terminal type rm /private/tmp/*-steam-mstr-* and press return, then launch Steam.
*[UPDATE] Newer clients (the About window doesn’t actually list a version. More Steam on Mac “goodness” 😐 ) will launch after a force quit by apparently recycling the left over files which needed to be removed manually before.
I cant seem to find such a file in my tmp folder, are you sure its named like that? and the terminal command simply states that the file does not exist… I’m still having this problem
I apologize. It seems this has since been fixed in the year and a half since I posted this. The latest client will simply recycle the two files removed by the above command so there is no need to remove them manually.
Also, if the files don’t exist then the ‘rm’ command will fail and this is not what is causing Steam to throw that error. I’ve had it happen to me recently during an update, but next time I tried it launched just fine.
Not much help, but it must be something else preventing you from launching Steam. 🙁
It appears to be a process running in the background, literally the engine might still be running or appears to be running, after a complete reboot the problem is fixed but the problem reappears after closing steam. I’ve tried to pinpoint the process thru activity monitor.app but with no success apparently… Do you know anything about this?
Maybe there’s a PID file laying around where ever Steam puts that at. I don’t see one in /var/run/ with Steam running, though.
It seems to only happen after gmod crashes and sometimes after I close it… Thanks for the help!!