The main problem if you are running Steam on Linux is to be careful of their program. It would be wise, not to connect to any local external hard drives while you’re running Steam. Users complaining of this bug appear to have moved their .steam or ~/.local/share/steam directories, or invoked Steam’s Bash script with the —reset option enabled. The bug appears to be caused by a line in the Steam.sh Bash script: This rm command tells the computer to remove the STEAMROOT directory and all its sub-directories (folders). The core of the issue is that if the STEAMROOT folder is not there then the computer interprets the command as rm -rf “/“*, which tells the Linux system to delete everything on your hard drive starting from the root directory. The saving grace for Linux users is that one can only erase files they have write permissions over. That usually means the system itself can’t be erased, but pretty much all of a user’s files—including photos and personal documents—would be at risk. Ironically, the instruction at issue is preceded by a comment from the developer: # Scary!. Indeed.
