Steam not launching on Ubuntu 18.04

This will be quick post.

I have steam installed on my Ubuntu machine and everything was working fine.

One day when I tried to start Steam to play a game I realized it is not launching.

It turned out installing cuda on Ubuntu 18.04 broke Steam. After I dig deeper I found out that the problem is because the nvidia driver coming with cuda installation package is broken.

But when I remove the cuda nvidia driver and re-install the standalone driver; this time while running cuda related things(deep learning training etc) things got a lot slower than before.

I needed another fix that will make steam working but cuda is also fine.

So the fix was;

• just remove cuda and nvidia drivers
• install nvidia driver stand alone supporting 32 bit
• install cuda package without nvidia driver.

Here are the commands I have used:

1- Remove everything related to nvidia:

> sudo apt-get remove --purge '^nvidia-.*'
> reboot

2- Install nvidia driver supporting 32 bit:

> wget http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/440.64/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-440.64.run
> chmod a+x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-440.64.run
> sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
> sudo apt install lib32gcc1 build-essential dkms
> sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-440.64.run --no-cc-version-check
> reboot

3- Install cuda except nvidia modules:

> wget https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads?target_os=Linux&target_arch=x86_64&target_distro=Ubuntu&target_version=1804&target_type=deblocal
> sudo dpkg -i cuda-repo-ubuntu1804-10-2-local-10.2.89-440.33.01_1.0-1_amd64.deb
> sudo apt-key add /var/cuda-repo-10-2-local-10.2.89-440.33.01/7fa2af80.pub
> sudo apt-get update
> sudo apt-get install cuda-toolkit-10-2 cuda-tools-10-2 cuda-compiler-10-2 cuda-libraries-10-2 cuda-libraries-dev-10-2
> echo 'export PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/cuda/bin"' | tee -a ~/.bashrc
> source ~/.bashrc
> sudo dpkg -i libcudnn7_7.6.5.32-1+cuda10.0_amd64.deb

After applying these; everything is working perfectly. Steam is working. pytorch things are as fast as before.

Hope this helps someone else too:)