How to resolve Steam taking forever "Processing Vulkan Shaders"

Since I had this problem on a newly built Ubuntu machine that I recently converted off Windows 10, I figured someone else may benefit.

If you start a game in Steam on Ubuntu (or other Linuxes), and a window pops up showing "Processing Vulcan Shaders", and the progress bar takes FOREVER to get from 0% to 1%, this article is for you.

First, find out how many cores you have.

Open a terminal

cat /proc/cpuinfo

Look for the line that says "cpu cores    :  X" where X is the number of cores you have.

Next 

cd .local/share/steam  

or

cd .steam/debian-installation

or if you use a flatpak version, go to 

cd .var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/data/Steam

Use your favorite editor to create a file here called steam_dev.cfg (sudo not needed, this is in userland)

vi steam_dev.cfg

add:

[hit a]

unShaderBackgroundProcessingThreads X

[hit esc] 

Where X is the number of cores you figured out in the first step in the process.  

Save and close the file. 

[:wq!]

Quit and restart Steam

Test if it worked 

Vulkan Shader Processing should be markedly speedier.

Source:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/jwwe1o/steam_takes_forever_to_finish_processing_vulkan/

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/4423184732111747107/

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Steam