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I still don’t quite understand why they litter one’s $HOME with this – creating a small setuid binary that checks the signature of a given .deb and then install

I still don’t quite understand why they litter one’s $HOME with this – creating a small setuid binary that checks the signature of a given .deb and then installs said Debian package system-wide, plus keeping certificates of purchase in one’s ~/.Steam directory appears to me to be a much more viable approach. This would allow for the easy specification of dependencies, would avoid having to re-download a game for multiple users and would allow easy ‘clean-up’ using just apt-get/dpkg. After all, package management on Linux is a solved problem (or as solved as it will get).

CJefferson 14y ago
While package management is a solved problem in Linux, I imagine they want to keep the coffee as similar as possible between Windows, Mac and Linux, and cross platform packaging is certainly an entirely unsolved problem. Also in steam it is traditional for games to just have a directory to themselves. Getting them to install things in the right place would be more work, and opens up risks from badly packaged games.