Unexpected error while trying to uninstall Proton

[naoliv]

Your system information

• Steam client version (build number or date): Oct 7 2020, at 06:16:33 / 1602115886
• Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): Debian Sid
• Opted into Steam client beta?: No
• Have you checked for system updates?: Yes

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

While trying to uninstall Proton we can see this:

This happens because we have games which are set to use this specific Proton version (and thus it's cannot be uninstalled).
The problem here is that the message is too much unspecific/generic and does not really indicate what the real problem is.

It would be better if, instead a generic "unexpected error" message, we could see a message saying Proton cannot be uninstalled because "Game1", "Game2", "Game etc" depend on it (or any other similar and more useful message).

Steps for reproducing this issue:

1. Have a game forced to use any specific Proton version
2. Try to uninstall that Proton version

[supertin]

As part of the fix for this, it would be helpful if we could also get a tab in the properties for Proton installs similar to the DLC tab for games that list the games currently set to be used by that version... We don't always want to have to try and uninstall Proton to see what's using it.

[DanMan]

Also an option to force the uninstall would be nice, which would then unset the required version on each of those games, so we don't have to manually change them one by one.

[akien-mga]

For the reference, there's useful discussion in #6894 and notably a good workaround from @tuxayo:

#6894 (comment)

I can confirm that when attempting to uninstall a Proton version and seeing it fail with a generic error, the logs do contain relevant info:

App ID 945360 depends on compatibility tool 1420170, cannot uninstall!GameAction [AppID 1420170, ActionID 19] : UninstallApps failed with AppError_17 with ""

You can search that App ID directly in your Steam library to find the game. Change Proton version to one you want to keep (e.g. I now use "Proton Experimental" for everything to keep it rolling, unless I explicitly need a fixed version for a given game), retry, and if it fails, repeat this until you no longer have any dependency on the old Proton version.

[kisak-valve]

While this issue has not been resolved, per "Offer better diagnostics when Steam Play tools cannot be removed due to dependencies. Improve overall robustness." in the 2021-05-14 Steam client beta update, the log message is now human readable and lists all games configured to use the Steam Play compatibility tool.

[Termuellinator]

Which logs are we talking about? I'd hoped for mentioning the games/appIDs in the GUI-Message ^^

[kisak-valve]

In my quick test, I observed the updated message in stdout/stderr terminal spew after starting steam in a terminal.

[MartinX3]

Ah, thank you.

It would be nice to get the list with names of the blocking games in the UI message as well :)

[YoshiRulz]

The workaround of looking for IDs in stdout also works with Steam's console (xdg-open steam://open/console).

[smcv]

This is almost the same issue as #8473: this issue is about uninstalling Proton, while #8473 is about uninstalling the various Steam Linux Runtime compatibility tools. In both cases, the issue can be summarized as:

• to reproduce: try to uninstall a compatibility tool that is needed by at least one installed game
• expected result: some sort of easily understandable error that mentions which game needs it
• actual result: the message in the UI is "missing shared content" which is not very clear
• workaround: look in Steam's log output or in xdg-open steam://open/console to find out which games need it