Steam error "No such file or directory" for 17.04

When I run command steam in the terminal it gives me this error.

$ steam
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
xz: (stdin): File format not recognized
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
find: ‘/home/jacob/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime’: No such file or directory

and when I click on the icon it tries to open for a few seconds and then goes away.

2 Answers

Simply open terminal and type:

mkdir /home/$USER/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime

This creates the missing directory, it worked for me when I had exactly the same error in 17.04.

For me got around it with $ rm -rf ~/.steam FWIW :)

This is like the "global nuke option" see the comments below: