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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

To this day, and for close to 20 years, Steam is one of the only applications I allow to run in the background (of my Windows PC). It's always been a remarkably lightweight application. It seamlessly keeps itself and my installed games up to date. And the 'workshop' is fantastic for most modding needs. Hard to think of a complaint really, aside from the occasional pop-up ad, but those have never been too obtrusive and they haven't gotten worse over the years.

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Steam consistently draws CPU resources. I make sure to disable it on startup. The storefront webview-wrapper also chugs hard and is much slower than just opening the site in a web browser. It updates every time it's launched. It always shows some kind of popup/advertisement... It's software I begrudgingly install.

I installed Steam because Valve bought Counter-Strike and made Steam a requirement to update it or play it online. Since Counter-Strike was originally a free mod, Steam only allows me to access what it took from me in the first place.

Alexander wanted to fulfill a wish for Diogenes and asked him what he desired. Diogenes replied, "Stand out of my light."

Surely you can see that Steam has come a long way since then. Hope you're not really still upset about that.

I feel the software has become significantly worse since its original Counter Strike release.

> It's always been a remarkably lightweight application.

Don't know if I agree. I remember having to turn it off a lot in the early days - but that was ~20 years ago. I will grant that unlike a lot of software it hasn't bloated too much in the intervening years, while hardware has gotten a lot faster.

With their migration to Chrome/electron/not sure what it is, Steam isn't as light weight as it used to be.

Especially on older PC's. It noticeably slows down the start up, does eat a lot of ram. It's definitely noticable on a friend's 2014 laptop with 8GB ram and a slower SSD.

> It noticeably slows down the start up

On my gaming PC I went into the Windows 10 Task Scheduler and added a task to run "steam.exe -silent" when the machine is idle for 10 minutes. That way it doesn't slow down booting but it does eventually get around to the updates if I fire it up and walk away.

This is the trust that Steam has produced and why no other store will ever come close. This long standing trust that they won’t muck with your running apps, that they won’t just throw popups on your screen (except when launching, tisk tisk), and that they will support the infrastructure required to keep those games and apps up to date.

Second would be Microsoft’s Store. On Apple it would be the other way around: Apple Store over Steam store. But aside of the native OS “store”, steam is the only 3rd party store I allow on my PC.

Valve has earned a lot of good will. But Steam is, in my opinion, by far the least impressive program they've released.

"It's always been a remarkably lightweight application"

Early in it's life it was not known as a lightweight application, I'm pretty sure it gave Java a bad reputation for Desktop apps.

It's also the only social network I haven't deleted my account for yet

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