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 bought a new laptop, and it was lagging more than my old PC. I was enraged by this fact. My old pc had 4gb RAM, my laptop would freeze playing games like osu. Yeah, 8gb was the limit in 2016, but not like to get random freezes. I installed Ubuntu and then never went back, now using Arch. Performance. No random things going under my nose, making spikes happen. Now, it's not about performance alone. It's about control and privacy. I study psychology and I wish my peers realized what it means using Meta services everyday, Microsoft, etc, and how these are connected with our everyday life, decisions and lack of control, thus worth to get the psychology field to debate and put the everyday services under discussion.