Absolutely hated it when I was forced to use it. Nowadays I don't mind that much anymore. But if a game needs to launch another launcher first, that drives me crazy.
Looking at you, EA and Ubishit.
I got into steam because I could (using modded files) download valve games for free. It was like piracy but without the torrenting and gameboxart.jpg.exe shenanigans.
Then I liked Counter Strike, and portal was coming out... and now I have a few thousand bucks in games.
Still don't like having to run a nanny program to be "allowed" to play the shit I paid for. But steam is the best of that garbage pile.
I got into it because I got Total War Napoleon (another annoying launcher with the Total War series nowadays…) and didn't realize beforehand that you needed an Steam account for it.
I came around to appreciate the storefront and library for my purchased digital games. But as you said, I don't want to have to run a nanny program to play my games. Especially my single player games.
That's what I like about gog though, I can just download an offline installer for my games from them. Although I think by now even they have games on their store that require launchers.
I use dedicated cpu cores and other tweaks on my setup to reduce game input latency. Steam is always the 1 fucking program that randomly starves my remaining cores for absolutely no reason
It’s such a garbage-tier app and always has been. Credit to Valve for busting open online app stores, but I have no idea why people like Steam so much.
That's what I always find funny about the EGS hate crowd... They complain about the features it didn't have at launch (that it now has) but in the end having to launch any launcher pisses me off, might as well use the one with the least garbage! No Valve, I don't need fucking trading cards with my games!
Steam has a whole lot of useless features compared to Epic or GOG Galaxy, it's the most bloated launcher available at the moment. Do you need cards and tradable items linked to your account to play your games?
What's funny is that if the roles were reversed Epic would be accused of trying to monetize whales and gamblers, but no one bats an eye because it's Valve doing it.
It's clearly not part of this discussion because you can't compare the user experience on Linux when the product you want to compare to doesn't exist on it.
Also, you can just shut up if you can't have a discussion without insulting the people you're talking to, no one asked you to take part in the first place since clearly you're trying to derail the discussion.
In a discussion where we're comparing the user experience of two products we need to compare them in an environment where both products are working so the user can experience them both.
I don't know how you can't figure that out but here we are.