So diskless clients and steam have had a bumpy road over the years, used to have to make a fakeflock.so to get around a locking bug. Then awhile after that, I believe when Proton reached version 8+ there was a horrible 30+ seconds of idle waiting time added to every game before it even attempted to load. The fix for that ended up being to mount a tmpfs over the runtime folder.
Since late January an update caused a new bug to appear, I've scoured everywhere many times over, and the only real info I ever found was a race condition existing that even very low latency networking would result in SteamWebHelper crashing with a popup, and all the choices did nothing. So the only real choice was to either keep loading steam repeatedly and hope it worked (very low chances, maybe 1% for us here) or leave the popup alone and steam would continue to load, but in a crappy state, no friends, no sharing games, etc. I've tried many combinations and discovered a solution, you no longer need fakeflock or tmpfs. 1.emerge dev-util/vmtouch 2. start steam, let it get to the crash popup, and pick to close exit steam (only have to do this once so that all the files are unpacked into the correct locations) 3. open your preferred terminal and cd /home/UserName/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64 4. vmtouch -L ./ (that locks the contents in RAM, for me around 1G of data 5. run steam, now it'll load much faster and not have any issues. 6. after steam loads you may control-C in the terminal vmtouch has the files locked in to let standard kernel memory management go back to doing its awesome job of caching what it actually needs to. Game on my fellow Gentoo Gaming Enthusiasts
