The client is definetly terrible. Slow to start. I have frikkin 2 different topbars that seemingly have similar options. Way to many locations for settings, spammy store page. Hard to navigate game library. The fact that the store page often is a better look at the game than the one in the library. Impossible to see what dlcs that is enabled unless you happen to borrow the game from someone in your family. Why van games corrupt and un and reinstalling is the only fix (verifying does sometimes not catch it).

I could go on. Its still the only store with acceptable linux experience sadly.

> A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal.

When I hear about a game on social media I often want to add it to a wishlist on Steam but I dread opening the app because I know it will take forever to open on MacOS.

I don't mind a game launcher taking time, but the store is a part of that which makes it annoying I avoid the native app for that reason.

I definitely don't leave the Steam launcher running all the time, on macOS it takes up a non-trivial amount of memory that I want to have available for other apps. I launch Steam when I want to play some games, then quit it when I want to do other stuff.

Startup is one thing, using the program is another. Steamwebhelper, the chromium based tool that renders everything web based in the client is awfully optimized and likes to noticeably utilize the CPU even when minimized on the tray, yet somehow always serves me with a blank page whenever I go store, community etc. on first try, I have to click the label multiple times to get anything. You can't even kill the process, because it's immediately relaunched, I just wish there was an option to disable it and only get the library.

the steam client is definitely kind of terrible, maybe i’m just biased because i have used steam deck since launch which uses big picture, but there have been bugs in the client that were extremely annoying and obvious that took years to fix (for example, closing a store page and losing page position, but then the page would scroll up when pressing down on a controller for years).

A very obvious non-deck example is how bad it can be at loading and showing videos on the store page. They consistently have issues with smooth playback, this is not my network, others i know have the same issue. it’s to the point that I scroll down and look at gifs in the description for gameplay footage first. I use the discovery queue often and it’s pretty apparent.

When I browse the store, I specifically do it in a browser because the client is so unpleasant to use. For launching games I have no choice. I love Steam as a concept and company, but it is not an enjoyable app to use by its own merits, in my opinion.

I find it very annoying. But not annoying enough to make me stop using Steam.

The upsides of having a de facto monopoly, I suppose—lamentably common story in tech.

Steam crashes my window manager every time I close it now. This started a couple weeks ago.

it changed from a small, fast native client to webshit quite a few years ago. the performance is acceptable now but it is indeed magnitudes slower. it also steals focus several times during startup which is the single greatest thing a developer of client software can do to be a shithead

Well two of us have said it just today so you’ll have to update your assumption.

Steam is dogshit and it’s crazy they haven’t optimised it all in 20 years.

the steam client on my current windows system is using 115mb of ram. I don't care how long it takes to start up, i just start it and leave it running.

I said it back when they first migrated to Electron, and I'll say it again now. It's not the slowest thing ever by modern standards, but it's definitely not fast, either, and is pretty bloated in terms of memory usage.

It only looks good if you compare it to the Epic client, which somehow manages to be much worse.

I definitely don’t leave the resource hog Steam running, because it can be slow and terrible. I turned off Steam Overlay and Notifications to get substantial speed up improvements.

[dead]

They might've pushed it from beta to stable reactively, but an improvement to startup times was in their beta channel last month: https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4397053?emclan=103...

Good to know. I would have hated if Valve was capable of such optimization in 24h all this time but didn't if it wasn't to answer Epic.

They released it like a day or two after Epic right? That is quite a coincidence ...

Personally, my longest and loudest complaint with steam is reliably putting a long hold on inputs when it starts up. If I launch steam on startup then I can't start doing anything else until it's done because it will jump on top of everything else when it feels like it. This is a particularly bad sin because this behavior is a way for credentials to leak.