It's nice but a low bar. Steam pioneered crappy Chrome-based desktop apps before Electron existed, which is also why it's so hard to run Steam in Wine. It has a longer startup and shutdown process (they even call it that) than my entire OS.

Epic, EA, etc then made their own similar launchers. Of course all of them also want to launch when Windows boots, update constantly, and not close when you press close.

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danparsonson a day ago | parent | next [-]

Out of interest why would you run Steam in Wine?

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mahboi a day ago | parent [-]

To play Windows-only games on Mac, or before Proton existed, Linux. You can't launch the games without Steam.

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rapind a day ago | parent | next [-]

KegWorks is an option.

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mahboi a day ago | parent [-]

KegWorks is deprecated in favor of Sikarugir. Maybe that works, but every time I've used some kind of Wine wrapper that people say works with Steam, it doesn't, or it kinda works with some workarounds until the next Steam update. I've used all the older stuff like WineBottler, PlayOnMac, Whisky, Wineskin, and probably others I'm forgetting. Usually no meaningful difference vs using GamePortingToolkit or Wine directly, but PlayOnMac has that 32on64 option that's important for modern Macs. Have even taken Cider ports and dropped exes inside.

The one exception is Crossover, which has been around very long and costs money. Probably worthwhile if you care for this.

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ofrzeta 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Incidentally I was just testing Crossover on Mac with mixed results. Totally random sample: Civ3 worked fine (after some fix to the startup in an INI file), HL1 random crashes although playable, Locomotion needed a workaround (dxwnd) to run windowed, Chants of Senaar ran fine.

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mahboi 8 hours ago | parent [-]

That's not surprising, as Proton is hit-or-miss too. But Crossover will at least run Steam, right?

	▲	ofrzeta 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The actual Steam application ran fine, yes.

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nextaccountic 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Proton is just Wine

	▲	mahboi 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's a fork, unlike these wrappers that are literally Wine. There are games that work in Proton but not in Wine, or work better in Proton.

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dgellow a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m pretty sure the early steam client was based on Trident before chromium no?

Edit: actually it seems to have been Trident, then WebKit, then Chromium Embedded

	▲	mahboi a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, but when they finally switched to Chromium, it was still before Electron

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codebje a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think these days it's easier to run Steam in Wine than it is to run Wine in the first place. If you're running a commercial packaging of Wine for gaming, both things are trivial.

(Successfully running Windows games is its own issue: I think "Steam Deck" compatibility badging is a pretty reliable tell for Linux gaming, but on a Mac, having the game be playable is a gamble on install and again with every patch.)

	▲	mahboi a day ago \| parent [-]
		If you pay for Crossover, sure. Not if you want to use the free Wine. And it used to be hard even in Crossover.

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gsich a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They used IE in the beginning.

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3mar2 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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