Without any flashy marketing campaigns or social media fanfare, Valve rolled out a routine Steam Client update containing a very simple line in the patch notes: “Improved Steam Client startup performance.”
Without any flashy marketing campaigns or social media fanfare, Valve rolled out a routine Steam Client update containing a very simple line in the patch notes: “Improved Steam Client startup performance.”
They are each bloatware that insists upon itself.
If Steam had not acquired a userbase by vendor lock-in it would be no more popular than any other “game launcher”.
Their sales alone would make them just as popular.
The free games are keeping Epic’s launcher remotely relevant.
People that insist that steam is good in any way are either never seen any other program or lying to themselves, it’s a horrible mess with a million pages that forces you to use itself because who knows why.
Honestly, my biggest issue with gaming on linux is that every damn launcher copies steam’s format - I want a (non vibe-coded) launcher that just makes a desktop file with a proper icon, and has a launch command.
I dont want the launcher to insert itself into the command, I want it to build the command I would use myself if I decided to delete the launcher.
Not sure why that’s so hard, its not like the launcher is actually needed for a game to launch.
That I believe is the game using steam’s drm. But if you have the right tools you can force games to do exactly what you said.
No, Lutris, Faugus Launcher, Bottles, Heroic all use their own custom “boot the launcher then the game” commands, and no, they don’t let you change that. This is not even considering steam games in the equation.
I don’t know what other tools than “make my own bash script” are available for easy non-steam library management, but if you know one that isn’t vibe-coded garbage, I would be happy to try it!