https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45251
--- Comment #6 from Daniel Berger 3dk@protonmail.com --- Ok, I figured it out. I had to increase the number of possible open files for a process. It was an issue with my system and you can stop reading here, unless you want to know the details which I will still describe, in case other people have the issue.
First I checked what the limit for open files was set to with the command: $ ulimit -n It was set to 1024 for my user which supposedly isn't very high. Apperently Red Hat is to thank for setting this low default limit. A more sensible limit is something like 10000. Using the ulimit command to set it like so: $ ulimit -n 10000 didn't work and gave an error about not having the permissions to increase the limit. If that command would have worked, it would have only set the limit for that shell instance, so the limit would have reverted back to 1024 if I close and reopened the terminal.
To permanently increase the the ulimit for all processes, I had to edit the config file "/etc/security/limits.conf" as root user.
There I simply had to add these two lines: * hard nofile 10000 * soft nofile 10000
After rebooting I checked ulimit -n again and could see that it finally set to 10000. Running steam after that worked again.
I had not run steam in months and is the first time that I had run into an issue with the file limit being reached by a program. It also didn't happen when running other programs with this same wine version (3.8). Maybe it is the result of more new features being added to wine and steam or the specific components that wine uses to run steam that have changed and lead to an increase in the necessary amount of open files... I do find it amazing that it is necessary for wine to open over 1024 files to run steam.
For anyone wanting to learn more about ulimit, here are some links I found in my search that describe it further:
https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/ulimit/ https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/75996/modify-ulimit-open-files-of-a... http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Ulimit https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=202694 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=194179 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PAM