With the widespread support for Steam/Valve on this forum because of their contributions to making Linux gaming easier, I’m now confused as to why people here are using Linux in the first place.
I personally do so out of support for FOSS software, the customizability, and actual ownership of software, which I thought were most people’s primary reasons for using any Linux distro. Steam seems antithetical to all of these. The software in the first place became popular as a form of DRM, and it gets publishers to use it for the allowance of DRM on the platform. The Steam client has the absolute minimum customizability. Your account can be banned at any point and you can lose access to many of the games you have downloaded.
Whenever I game on Linux I just use folders to sort my game library and purchase any games I want to play on itch.io or GoG. On my Linux PC I stay away from clients like Steam because I want a PC that works offline, and will work if all of my accounts were banned. It’s more of a backup PC.
Since Steam has every characteristic of Windows, 0 customizability, DRM, plenty of games that are spyware, I see no reason to really not use Windows instead for the much easier time I can have playing games.
Yes, I prefer many of the features of Linux distros, but using a client like Steam defeats the purpose of them. Ridiculous storage requirements due to unoptimized dependencies, having to have a background client running for some games and wasting resources on doing so.
So, why use Linux and support Steam, or use Linux and use Steam?
I get you, OP. Sometimes it seems like people treat Steam as the pinnacle of Linux. It’s even more baffling when people say that they like Linux but wish they could run MS Office, Photoshop etc. Do you really like Linux or do you just hate Windows? Because for me almost the entire point of Linux is that it’s FOSS. If all I wanted was to run proprietary software, I would use an OS that the proprietary software officially supports and was designed to run on, saving myself a ton of trouble.
Yeah this is my main point, I feel the same way when people are trying to run other proprietary software. I understand just being very particular about workflow, big part of the reason I use any given Linux distro, but moving to Linux to then go through the hoops of running MS Office, which even in the best case scenario will be another app that is not easy to update, has always seemed silly to me.