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The mere existence of Steam is astounding to someone who grew up playing nethack and chess on Linux. But the Steam client is really strange. Sometimes it works

The mere existence of Steam is astounding to someone who grew up playing nethack and chess on Linux. But the Steam client is really strange. Sometimes it works for months, and suddenly a game won't start, or something doesn't work, and I have to do weird stuff to get it working like purging all files or reinstalling. It doesn't make sense, it's like the Steam client rots.

sunaookami 2y ago
Steam is one of the worst software, it's frankly embarassing for such a huge company. It's a hotchpotch of different design principles and new features only get tacked on with a very different UI + UX. The client is mostly webviews but they are so slow and buggy and they use a very old insecure Chromium version under the hood. The launcher is still a 32 bit program. It's sad that other launchers are even worse though.
- tapoxi 2y ago
  I checked and its using Chromium 126.0.6478.183 from July, which isn't that old.
  - sunaookami 2y ago
    It's four versions behind the current one with a lot of CVEs. There seems to be an LTS 126 but it's only for ChromeOS - it's at least behind this one which fixed one critical and two High CVEs: https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2024/11/long-term-support-channel-update-for.html https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2024/11/long-term-supp... Even being only one version behind is dangerous for such a huge attack vector.
- 0x457 2y ago
  It seems like a lot of steam client issues come from weird desire to: 1) Keep it 32 bit 2) Have a single store-frontend At least, it came to a conclusion that it steam itself should be responsible for managing runtimes for games.
- account42 2y ago
  Exactly, Steam is very much the worst game launcher ever created, except for all the others.
- sneed_chucker 2y ago
  The interesting thing is that Valve is not a "huge company". They're privately held and only had 336 employees the last time headcount was reported (2021).
VyseofArcadia 2y ago
In my experience, all of those things are also true of Steam on Windows. In fact, if anything I have to deal with it less frequently since switching exclusively to Linux.

sunaookami 2y ago

Steam is one of the worst software, it's frankly embarassing for such a huge company. It's a hotchpotch of different design principles and new features only get tacked on with a very different UI + UX. The client is mostly webviews but they are so slow and buggy and they use a very old insecure Chromium version under the hood. The launcher is still a 32 bit program. It's sad that other launchers are even worse though.

tapoxi 2y ago
I checked and its using Chromium 126.0.6478.183 from July, which isn't that old.
- sunaookami 2y ago
  It's four versions behind the current one with a lot of CVEs. There seems to be an LTS 126 but it's only for ChromeOS - it's at least behind this one which fixed one critical and two High CVEs: https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2024/11/long-term-support-channel-update-for.html https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2024/11/long-term-supp... Even being only one version behind is dangerous for such a huge attack vector.
0x457 2y ago
It seems like a lot of steam client issues come from weird desire to: 1) Keep it 32 bit 2) Have a single store-frontend At least, it came to a conclusion that it steam itself should be responsible for managing runtimes for games.
account42 2y ago
Exactly, Steam is very much the worst game launcher ever created, except for all the others.
sneed_chucker 2y ago
The interesting thing is that Valve is not a "huge company". They're privately held and only had 336 employees the last time headcount was reported (2021).

VyseofArcadia 2y ago

In my experience, all of those things are also true of Steam on Windows. In fact, if anything I have to deal with it less frequently since switching exclusively to Linux.