I had and still have some issues with Steam on Linux. I wanted to use my native system libraries instead of the ones Steam includes. This is a native feature for Steam. Just start Steam with STEAM_RUNTIME=0 set and you’re good to go. At least in theory. Sadly Steam uses a lot of 32-Bit libraries which are not installed on the average 64-Bit Ubuntu. I wrote a small script to solve this problem:

#!/bin/bash
set -x
set -e
set -o pipefail

cd ~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/
for INSTALLME in $(LD_LIBRARY_PATH=".:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}" \
  ldd $(file *|sed '/ELF/!d;s/:.*//g')| grep 'not found'|sort| \
  uniq|sed 's/^[ \t]*\([a-z0-9.-]*\).*/\1/'|apt-file search -f -| \
  head -1|cut -d ' ' -f1)
do
  ALLINSTALL="${ALLINSTALL} ${INSTALLME}i386"
done
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ${ALLINSTALL}

Keep in mind that this script doesn’t always chose the best solution, so read the apt-get install message carefully. In my case some libraries were found in the i386 packages of Thunderbird and Firefox leading to an attempted uninstall of the x86_64 Bit versions. In this case you probably need to resolve the dependencies yourself. Additionally, my Steam installation depended on libudev.so.0 which isn’t available on Ubuntu 15.10 (and, as I read on the internet not on 14.04 either). You need to install this manually:

cd /tmp/ && wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/main/u/udev/libudev0_175-0ubuntu9_i386.deb \
&& sudo dpkg -i libudev0_175-0ubuntu9_i386.deb && rm libudev0_175-0ubuntu9_i386.deb

Afterwards I was able to start Steam with STEAM_RUNTIME set to 0. Next stop: Dual monitor problems in several games.