I used to think vibe coding would get us slow Electron apps but now we got speed wars between game launchers. I hope this comes for all types of software.
With that said, I tested it right now and Steam takes about 2 seconds to restore from tray and 10-15 for cold boot. The new Epic launcher is around 0.5 and 5 like the article mentioned. Maybe it's still in A/B testing or something.
I would go one step farther - if you're vibe coding, skip Tauri altogether. I've been on-and-off vibecoding a GitKraken replacement using egui instead, and the memory footprint is very low. Otherwise can't tell the difference, as I'm not reading the code either way.
I vibe-coded a paste manager using wails (https://github.com/egeozcan/mahpastes), and I'm currently on linux (bazzite) and I have 0 problems with the rendering.
What I meant: they can write it pretty well. Probably because share of good quality code of native apps is much higher bad quality, due to all js slop we had even before LLM slop.
But there’s still no way to get consistent results cross-platform without a web view, right? I guess Tauri isn’t even consistent because it relies on the system’s browser and they do differ to some degree.
My friend, inconsistency is the entire point. You now have incredible power to write truly native apps that fit in with the platform and follow all the standards. The bottleneck is now you, or whoever owns each target platform and understands what native apps feel like.
So I’m supposed to maintain a native app for each platform and try to be sure they’re aligned in every way except visuals? Sounds like a recipe for bad UX if anybody uses more than one of them.
On the contrary: using a web view is the worst possible UX for your users. It's slow, uses a ton of memory, and doesn't integrate well with the desktop. The only reason people ever did it was laziness, not because it produced a better product.
If you're writing five apps, you're doing it wrong. A huge amount of probably any app can be contained in a common blob of business logic and wiring, with some native presentation on top. Yes, I oversimplify, but folks have been doing exactly that for decades. More work? Yup, even with a common engine it's more work than firing up Electron. That's where "do we even give a shit about what we're shipping?" comes in. If there's no pride in the finished product, well, Electron isn't going to save your product, either.
> Yeah the problem is having to write 5 apps, not the inconsistency.
Isn’t that what abstraction and interface is about? You can write the common business logic and presentation concerns, and then share it across each native implementation.
That is what web wrapping is in truth, but it’s just inneficient because of the huge surface area of web technologies.
The hidden reason why so many people are frustrated with 'modern design' that goes unaddressed is that most software nowadays completely ignores the standards of the system it runs on. Every single developer of even the most trivial apps insists that their design language is the most important in the room, which is what brings us to the temptation of using a webapp for everything so every user on every OS sees the exact same thing. It's gotten so bad that the only places I see native system UIs from third parties is either older software or hobbyist projects, but never anything corporate.
Some of that is also that what "native UI" means has shifted a bit. To look at Windows, Win95 had a thoroughly considered UI design that was very well adapted to both what it needed to do and the hard constraints on it. Win11 is... kind of a shitshow. (Are parts of it still from Windows 3.1? I haven't tried to track them down... but in Win10 there were a few dark corners.) It made sense to match the native UI in the Win95 days. It often doesn't now, it's simply not a target worth hitting. You could just use Win32 and target the older Win95 look, but apart from appearance issues, it was designed to work well in 1995, and we simply demand different things from our UIs now. Like support for touchscreens. Old Win32 apps are painful on touchscreens. (But, often, awesome without a mouse.) And those are real considerations, not oooh-shiny-new-thing designer BS.
Skia is the 2D graphics library used in Chromium. A number of GUI frameworks (Flutter and Avalonia) directly use Skia to do non-native platform GUIs that are consistent across platforms.
The real reason rewrites to fix tech debt used to fail was that it took too long to get to feature partity & the goal posts moved constantly while you were on the rewrite team.
The sunk cost of existing code is no longer considered in a rewrite.
Maybe it was hard to write in the first place, but it is not hard to rewrite anymore, as long you've got decent tests.
i don't care how fast it is beyond a certain point. What is more shocking is all the bugs that vibe coding landed epic. I can't imagine shipping software at this scale in this state.
I'd imagine one can now focus on creating a client for a single OS and having the AI do the porting to others as it would essentially be a translation.
Perhaps it will bring back native apps because supporting other platforms is less laborious.
Interesting, I didn't know they moved to a Chromium based desktop application. But honestly, I don't feel like there's any performance issues with the steam desktop client (I'm running it on Fedora, but I'm assuming performance is relatively similar on different platforms).
The new version of Epic is based on Tauri. Also written in JS and probably React (haven't decompiled it yet) but the web runtime is part of Windows instead of shipped with the app so it takes less disk space and RAM. And you can write perf sensitive code in Rust for even more speedup.
Hopefully LLM models and harnesses improve to where Chromium or Electron apps can be more trivially converted to native apps. You're paying for tokens for downstream compute efficiency across the user base.
They already are. I asked opus 5.5 to plan out and begin building a swift version of my electron notes app, using a similar architecture / feature set. I hut enter and honestly forgot about it. 2 hours later im reading slack while making my next round of coffee, and my session is interrupted by a native app opening on my phone (the model installed it for me to test). It.... has 2/3 of the features already and looks awesome, holy crap. It skipped my suggestion to use the Lexical (web) editor and is.... using. platform native one.
time will tell if it can make it the way i like but.... it can definitely get far. Used 40% of my session limits on my $20/mo sub.
I wonder what best practices here look like at this point. In my world, we've moved past skills for something like this, having porting helper/validator/etc things be harness level is measurably better than what skills look like right now. The open plugin spec is certainly an improvement (namely in packaging and distribution)- but, really you'd be leaving perf on the table if you were not to tune your harness. I wonder if something like dsh, pi, or other extensible (coding) harnesses have something like a concept of "harness as an extension".
It's because no matter how 'good' the AI output is, "vibe coding" is strongly associated with "completely unreviewed and untested". LLMs have brought the skill floor straight through the ground and into the depths of hell, so people are doubly cautious with it because there's a very good chance with any vibe coded app that there's not a single person in the world that truly understands what it actually does just behind the scenes. It could be completely fine, or it could be breaking your system or uploading your sensitive data somewhere because the vibe coder provided flawed instructions or the LLM decided to make an unexpected 'optimization'. Wanna roll the dice and find out which one it is?
It’s just that the vibe coded stuff has so many assumptions baked in, that you will be constantly surprised about the behaviors your slopped codebase has. Doesn’t matter for small tools, where you’ll be delighted that clicking that one label copies it to your clipboard - nice one, Claude, that’s delightful!
It’s less nice when your web app launches that other service only when the other Tailscale node is up, because the agent interpreted your prompt as a hard access rule.
I'm reserving "vibe coding" in my head for "the programming style where you just prompt your way around without even looking at the code and only caring if your happy path works".
I have a couple of nice "vibe coded" apps I would never dream of releasing because I'm not interested in the QA, more than anything else. The problem is the other people who are not quite so considerate and think that what they tossed out in 15 minutes is of interest to the rest of the world. The value of a software package release now is more in the QA than the code.
> People still talk about "Vibe coding" or implying "vibe coded" stuff is poor quality
Yes they do. Because it is. Anyone who cares about the quality of their product is, at minimum, carefully reviewing the output from an LLM to make sure it didn't sneak in anything crazy. More likely they are writing a lot of code by hand, because that is faster than reviewing and correcting the LLM code. Competent developers do not just hand it off and say "the AI is really good so I can trust what it put out".
Yeah I'm really impressed by what Opus 5.5 can manage.
I feel like human code is on a wide quality spectrum. The best human code is way better than what Opus 5.5 can do. But the average code, I'm not so sure.
I have only very rarely in my career encountered code worse than what an LLM produces. It happens, but your typical programmer is still quite a bit better than an LLM.
Trust me I know what it's like. I do a lot of it. Even with Opus you still have to guide it aggressively or your codebase turns to slop.
An experienced dev with Claude is better than either of them alone but you can't just point your agent at a repo and expect good results. And when people talk about vibe coding that's usually what they mean.
> Epic may have “vibe coded” a faster client, but Valve proved that targeted optimization on a decades-old ecosystem can still beat out AI speedruns.
Optimizing a project with AI is one of the most trivial things you can do with AI.
I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
Once I had a good benchmark script, Opus 4.8 or whatever made my terminal app faster with less memory than ghostty and kitty. It's not even interesting.
> The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
The dark forest hypothesis is that we can't find any alien life because it's dangerous to broadcast your existence and location to competitors. So rational thing for every alien civilian to do (and arguably for us) is to keep quiet.
Yeah exactly, Valve engineers probably just told AI to make it faster.
Your "dark forest" analogy sounds reasonable but Epic's outright admission of "vibe coding" is a bit of a footgun considering how rabidly anti-AI the folks on sites like Reddit are. If they had just been like, "it's faster and supports Linux" they would be the darling of the internet.
Epic Games wants to make an "AI-first" game, so they need to push "vibe coding" onto the gaming audiences to get them to accept it before they lay off people and ask $69 for a game where the art is made by an LLM.
All I can think with this whole situation is how much time is wasted by people getting angry and defensive on behalf of a Valve. It's almost like people have a parasocial relationship with the application itself.
That's not even getting to some of the "missing" features.
No Community marketplace for in-game items
No Direct player-to-player item trading
No Digital trading cards, levelling, and points shop
I hope more application developers "forget" to add these features.
People have wasted their time defending their platform's "honour" for decades. It used to be Sega vs Nintendo. Then it was PlayStation vs XBox. Now it's Steam vs EGS.
Anyway, what are useful features of Steam:
- their dedication to getting Windows games running on Linux (to see off the existential threat Microsoft poses to them, but nonetheless greatly appreciated)
- community forums / screenshots / artwork / guides etc. for every product. Very useful if the game vendor doesn't have its own, and most game vendors don't
- that Steam Sales encourage vendors to offer games at much more reasonable prices (e.g. a few pounds/dollars/etc.) for what is effectively a license, revocable at any time, not a real purchase. £60? Ha ha fuck off, I'm waiting for the sale when it's £5
- also, as far as I've seen, every game distributed can still be downloaded today. People may complain that publishers update a title e.g. to remove licensed music 10 years later... but you can still download the old version with some trickery. And I've never seen Steam actively remove downloads for existing customers, I've only seen games removed from the store so no future customers
- pirates have found that most games, if their only DRM is Steamworks, are incredibly easy to crack. I am very glad Steam has convinced most publishers to use that alone and nothing worse, and I curse publishers who insist on their own DRM, their own launcher, etc. If Valve goes tits-up, I have a lot of confidence most of peoples libraries will still be playable with a little bit of cracking.
There are other useful features, even if Valve is getting rich and fat off selling gambling and day-trading to teenagers.
I think the "fanboyism" of Steam is a bit different to platform wars like PS vs Xbox, etc.
Fundamentally Valve has built up a lot of trust with the gaming community, and other than microtransactions and gambling, I think it's very fair to say they've been a net good for both the PC gaming community; as well as the ecosystem.
Valve have my trust just by being privately held company that can actually plan for decades ahead instead of try to appease major shareholders or black rock.
It took them 10 years to make Linux a competetive gaming platform.
They invested in VR early and still do a lot for this niche market.
They brought back hanfheld PC from being niche chinese devices to being mainstrean and maintain support for Steam Deck for 5 years.
As game developer I do find 30% cut abysmal, but it's not any worse than consoles and I dont like Epic as a gamer for being awfully anti-consumer. I certainly dont want PC game market to be controlled by chinese Tencent subsidiaries.
Don't forget big picture mode. Nowadays Steam is a better game console than an actual game console. That's the only way I use it anymore.
...and the hardware ecosystem, too. I just got my Steam controller last week, and it's wonderful. It's so good I'm playing Civ with it. Civ! On a gamepad!
FTFY. Steam forums are a cesspoll most often than not. No, we do not want a easy accessible place where people can spew their crap on the internet. It's either moderated and useful or it shouldn't exists.
I "defend" valve because they're seemingly the only company that cares about the end-user linux experience.
Rocket league used to have a Linux build, then epic decided to kill that off entirely.
I recently bought the steam frame. It's years past when I would have wanted this VR headset the most, but half the reason I bought it was to support Valve's R&D with Linux desktop support, arm JIT translation, etc.
People bitch and moan about "voting with your wallet", then you have a company that tons of people continually vote with their wallet for, then people complain about others defending the one company that doesn't seem to want to screw their userbase over.
Sure Steam has some blind spots for the very sweaty semi-pro gamer. I don't care about virtual stickers and little treats. I care that all my games run on my Linux desktop after years of devs not giving a shit and other companies being openly hostile.
Valves competitors suck. Their VR competitor is Meta which in a just world would not exist as an organization. Their gaming marketplace competitor is Epic, which produces the character-slop extraction shooter and a launcher that gets more annoying to use every time I open it.
The other "competitors" if you can even call them that, are microsoft who has basically deleted a dozen game studios in the last year via moneyball, and other game companies like EA and Ubisoft who routinely delete purchased games and tell the users to go suck it.
Valve is basically the only company out there who is resisting the constant urge to make everything shitty to increase investor profits. They stay private and everyone loves what they do with that power. I'm sure a ton of fail-son PE bros are dying for the chance to buy out valve and turn everything it's ever done to absolute dogshit. We'd be getting half-life 3, 4, 5, 6, mobile, etc and they'd all be shit.
I do genuinely dislike their game launcher, but also I don't want to have multiple game launchers even if it was working well given it's just overhead.
I'll happily pay to have a game on Steam vs getting it for free on Epic. Steam has been a good experience for me the past 2+ decades :)
I wouldnt mind Epic if their platform wasn't so intentionally anti-consumer. I dont have any issues with Epic other products - I dont play Fortnite, but Unreal was net positive for gamedev and Epic also sponsored a lot of open sourcr software including Godot which is nice of them.
Unfortunately literally everything is wrong with EGS specifically.
Their stance on intentionally not having user reviews because consumers shouldn't have power to react to publisher or developers decisions.
Their giving away games for free and then revoking licenses then removing them from accounts even though it was purely their own fault. They were most successful company ever back then and could certainly eat that loss.
Their shitty account system that certainly got hacked multiple times because it's the only gaming platform where someone constantly trying to access my accounts even though I'm Linux and cybersecurity nerd with random 32-char passwords. They also dont have straightforward way to change account region without trying to deal with their shitty support.
Tim Sweeney decided to make a platform to fuck over gamers and we gamers returned favour.
Things nobody has said since like 2005? A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal. Especially when everyone just leaves it running anyway. There's far more significant aspects like memory usage, game library, and general features.
The client is definetly terrible. Slow to start. I have frikkin 2 different topbars that seemingly have similar options. Way to many locations for settings, spammy store page.
Hard to navigate game library. The fact that the store page often is a better look at the game than the one in the library.
Impossible to see what dlcs that is enabled unless you happen to borrow the game from someone in your family. Why van games corrupt and un and reinstalling is the only fix (verifying does sometimes not catch it).
I could go on. Its still the only store with acceptable linux experience sadly.
"Acceptable" is doing heavy lifting, because if you have a non-us keyboard layout Steam moves heaven and earth to ensure that no matter how hard you work to launch games with US keyboard, they will still use your non-US layout and be broken by default.
> A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal.
When I hear about a game on social media I often want to add it to a wishlist on Steam but I dread opening the app because I know it will take forever to open on MacOS.
I don't mind a game launcher taking time, but the store is a part of that which makes it annoying I avoid the native app for that reason.
It’s been a little while since I used Steam but you used to be able to do that from their own website, I think it was store.steampowered.com (I am guessing the website from memory). My game PC wasn’t my main PC so I didn’t even had Steam on that pc and it was what I used to buy the games - don’t really remember if I wishlist too because I use bookmarks in web browsers and folders for the bookmarks.
A launcher is a parasite mostly used to collect stats. Having it take five seconds before you even get to the point of actually starting to load your game is preposterous. Whereas who cares if it takes five seconds for a store to load? At least I play games more often than buy new ones.
I don't have a MacOS comparison point, but steam for me is pretty equivalent to the numbers in the article. ~10 seconds for a cold start, half a second for a warm start. Unless you have a very different definition of "take forever"? What are you seeing on MacOS?
I tested the latest Steam build on MacOS and it took 7 seconds to load on an M4 Max and I had to close a popup when it opened.
In the web world and 7-10 seconds for a pageload is forever. Same with mobile, if you tapped an app icon and it loaded that slow it would never be tolerated.
> In the web world and 7-10 seconds for a pageload is forever.
Given that its primary purposes are to start video games that take anywhere from five to thirty+ seconds to start and to download video games and their patches which range in size between many hundreds of MBs to a hundred+ GBs, the client taking roughly ten seconds to start is no problem.
Optimize where it makes sense, yanno? I'd much rather have to "deal with" the Steam client taking ten seconds to start than to have to deal with the Epic Games Launcher's download rate being limited to 100->150 mbit/s. [0]
[0] Last I checked on this was a few years ago -like twelve months after Sea Of Thieves stopped being widely popular- so it may have improved. The absurdly slow download speeds [1] are one of the bigger reasons why I stopped using EGS.
[1] Sure, many people don't have connections any faster than that. I do. Steam saturates it, and -at the time- EGS absolutely did not and occupied 100% of one logical CPU while failing to do so.
m5pro 64gb, 3s to get to the first 'loading window', 5s to get to the store page. But honestly who gives a shit. If you are the average working joe who comes home from work and fires up the pc to play a game, a 5s load of steam is not even a piece of gravel in the road let alone a speed bump. It's not like i'm opening and closing steam 100, 50 or even 5 times a day. It's a useless metric.
A modern computer runs circles around your 90s computer... if the code was the same, it should be crazy fast. Instead, everything is a web browser, and each of them need to load 1gb of junk into memory each time you click on them.
Startup is one thing, using the program is another. Steamwebhelper, the chromium based tool that renders everything web based in the client is awfully optimized and likes to noticeably utilize the CPU even when minimized on the tray, yet somehow always serves me with a blank page whenever I go store, community etc. on first try, I have to click the label multiple times to get anything. You can't even kill the process, because it's immediately relaunched, I just wish there was an option to disable it and only get the library.
When I browse the store, I specifically do it in a browser because the client is so unpleasant to use. For launching games I have no choice. I love Steam as a concept and company, but it is not an enjoyable app to use by its own merits, in my opinion.
the steam client is definitely kind of terrible, maybe i’m just biased because i have used steam deck since launch which uses big picture, but there have been bugs in the client that were extremely annoying and obvious that took years to fix (for example, closing a store page and losing page position, but then the page would scroll up when pressing down on a controller for years).
A very obvious non-deck example is how bad it can be at loading and showing videos on the store page. They consistently have issues with smooth playback, this is not my network, others i know have the same issue. it’s to the point that I scroll down and look at gifs in the description for gameplay footage first. I use the discovery queue often and it’s pretty apparent.
I definitely don't leave the Steam launcher running all the time, on macOS it takes up a non-trivial amount of memory that I want to have available for other apps. I launch Steam when I want to play some games, then quit it when I want to do other stuff.
it changed from a small, fast native client to webshit quite a few years ago. the performance is acceptable now but it is indeed magnitudes slower. it also steals focus several times during startup which is the single greatest thing a developer of client software can do to be a shithead
I said it back when they first migrated to Electron, and I'll say it again now. It's not the slowest thing ever by modern standards, but it's definitely not fast, either, and is pretty bloated in terms of memory usage.
It only looks good if you compare it to the Epic client, which somehow manages to be much worse.
I definitely don’t leave the resource hog Steam running, because it can be slow and terrible. I turned off Steam Overlay and Notifications to get substantial speed up improvements.
My guess based on the timing is that it is primarily for the Steam Frame. Steam is not just a game launcher but the entire desktop environment for the Steam Machine, the Steam Deck, and anything else like Bazzite that uses it as its primary UI as well. But in those cases, while at scale every second saved is nice, for the most part a second here or there doesn't really amount to that much.
But for the Steam Frame, which is probably booting while it is strapped to your face and completely obscuring your vision, every second is felt much more intensely. Anything that can be done to get to first interaction sooner has a much, much larger effect on the feel of the experience.
The speed would always have been nice to have, but it moves beyond "nice to have" for the Steam Frame case into having a significant effect on how it feels to use and the out-of-box experience. Yes, you'll use sleep most of the time, but when you do a full boot or reboot, you feel the seconds.
If I had a performance improvement ready for release, and my competitor started bragging about being faster, I'd for sure jump at the opportunity to release it sooner.
It was in the beta channel from some time now being updated and refined, steam is constantly updating the beta channel and promotes updates to general channel every now and then.
Most likely nobody complained and startup time isn't an important metric for them. The typical user may have Steam launch at startup or launch it once after booting their PC and then leave it running for days or weeks.
Personally, my longest and loudest complaint with steam is reliably putting a long hold on inputs when it starts up. If I launch steam on startup then I can't start doing anything else until it's done because it will jump on top of everything else when it feels like it. This is a particularly bad sin because this behavior is a way for credentials to leak.
I can honestly say I haven’t really had any issues with the client. Sure restoring from tray and starting are slow but other than that it’s been rock solid for me and for something that is mainly hosting a web view it’s nice that it doesn’t eat 1-3GB of memory in the background.
I’m curious what issues you have run into that you consider it terrible?
This is such an ignorant statement. Steam works great, and has for 20+ years. If you think it's 'horrible' please explain why you have a personal issue with it.
What are the possibilities of AI learning how to code efficient apps, e.g. low memory apps, or faster apps, or both? I feel like that is the kind of cheap work that requires too much intelligence for humans, yet provides immense benefits to users.
Just recently I learned Listary has a new beta written in Rust. It is fast! The previous one kept crashing. Asking AI to code Rust style, is probably a shortcut method.
It's an AI meme site. They don't do real reporting. That's why their source of how long it takes to open Steam is a single out of context clip with no comparison to anything else
It may be faster than Epic, but it is still unreasonably slow for something that really does very little at the end of the day. It's quite tragic that the company that brought us Proton and Windows games on Linux at near equal performance can't do a better job with the client or can't be bothered to improve it. That, and the decades old bugs in Half Life, Left 4 Dead and other classic games that probably still generate not insignificant revenue.
The 'vibe coded' part needs to go. Both teams likely used AI-assisted coding. Neither team's product was completed by robots, not with current tech. Epic had the launcher update ready in advance to handle the bad PR from their announcement. Prepare for more announcements from Epic how AI and not humans solved something.
I had suspected that they simply invoked client ready faster and let misc information fetch in background. After a little bit of reversing they did infact just make the client spawn earlier.
Steam client was always fast, majority of load time is (and forever will be) network speed.
I think vibe coding will force everyone to stay on their toes and keep being at the edge, moat defences have lowered and competition is up, as consumers we will get much better products for much cheaper. Let's just hope there is enough people left with jobs to pay for the services and the others can re-invent theirselves in a career that is still valuable in an LLM world.
When you vibe code and tell your agent to "keep working till everything loads inside 100 milliseconds", you end up with a super hideous codebase which does insane things like having a custom memory allocator, handwritten assembly, etc etc.
Valve: “thank God we are paying (checks notes) hundreds of thousands to be .5 seconds faster on a desktop app boot. Let’s push out the marketing material!”
How about actually testing both launchers on same device or at least give startup numbers of steam before/after update? So annoyed by this "comparison" honestly.
Nobody asked for this! We just want more, better and cheaper games! That's it. I could care less how quick it takes to launch an app which then stays open for hours/days.
I was in my 30s before I understood that people say "could care less" when they mean "couldn't care less." I'll never understand how people can say it without wanting to claw out their larynx as badly as it makes me want to claw out my eardrums, but I'm gradually learning acceptance -- and how not to let my horror show on my face.
This feels like a strange argument given site we are on. "Why are applications so slow and bloated these days" has been a pretty constant complaint around here for many, many years.
This is a garbage article, lmao. Comparing architectures as "AI assisted (vibe coded)" and "Optimized modular CEF", and highlighting Steam as being faster in tray restore when it is slower.
Not that it's specifically relevant to this but it's bloody terrible that we need any launcher at all. A whole generation is barely even aware that you used to able to buy and play a game without an online middleman sitting on your computer.
Can we stop putting Chrome in everything? Why does it take billions of instructions and hundreds of thousands to billions of bytes of RAM to display some text and pictures?
Fair question, but there is a decent answer. It's because Steam is an app that is shipped to 3 platforms and at least 2 architectures; the web platform is a platform- and architecture-agnostic target; and there is an extremely large set of tools and large developer pool to pull from. It may not be the set of you trade-offs you would have chosen, but it's also a reasonable choice for the problem they are tackling with the set of real-world constraints they are presented with.
Great. Now make it not need a constantly running process, and not using GB of memory when I forget to close it. May not be a big deal on a desktop, but on a laptop having this kind of bloat is obnoxious.
They would have to rewrite the app and use Tauri/WebView2 or native code. CEF blows up your memory use because you ship a whole ass Chromium browser.
You can't really avoid a long running process for a game launcher though. It's just how they work, you need to keep track of play time and respond to any API calls from the game. But it could be a native background daemon instead of two Steam Web Helpers.
> They would have to rewrite the app and use Tauri/WebView2 or native code. CEF blows up your memory use because you ship a whole ass Chromium browser.
The only benefits of Tauri are the smaller application package and the fact that the runtime is always up to date (which can also be a downside). That full package doesn't live in RAM when it's running, so it's "merely" wasted disk space and not RAM. In terms of RAM it uses just as much as electron or CEF.
> You can't really avoid a long running process for a game launcher though
I disagree. I get that steam has useful features I want while in-game (e.g. invite a friend to play), but there's no reason it couldn't just run this launcher only when a steam game is running and immediately exit once it's done.
Also, I think a lot of people forget how small well written software can be -- we're talking like single or double digit megabytes. Heck there's a whole linux distro that's under 20mb.
Wow this is really the unthinking man's blog post. This is a known slop news site and HN should not allow it here. I like Steam, but at least Epic actually gave a comparison that we can interpret as two load times on the same PC. These metrics are completely useless without that.
Somebody clipping how long it takes Steam to open on their computer with no other context is pretty meaningless. For all we know, it's running slower on their computer today. There's no before/after, no comparison to Epic. Yet this article just confidently asserted the figure as universal. Moronic.
Honestly, I have no idea what business Steam has starting for whopping 5 seconds as it is right now (after the 'speedup').
It is a simple shell for launching already downloaded apps. This is disgrace and nothing to boast about, especially considering Valve takes 30% cut of basically PC gaming marked for making it.
It's way more than this. Some may argue about how useful all of these features are, but Steam client is also a store (with lots of personalizations), a social network (forums, text and voice chat, personal profiles etc), a mod hosting platform, a game review site, a digital marketplace (cards and items. You may be surprised how popular this aspect is). It also does the controller remapping, manages cloud saves and screenshots/videos, allows to store games at several locations at ones. It provides games related news, checks for updates on all of the installed games.
Again, one may argue how useful all of this is, but it is there, and most users likely have the app on a OS startup anyway.
With that said, I tested it right now and Steam takes about 2 seconds to restore from tray and 10-15 for cold boot. The new Epic launcher is around 0.5 and 5 like the article mentioned. Maybe it's still in A/B testing or something.
Disclaimer: All mine, open-source, ai-assisted, less than 5MB each. I love rust+tauri combo.
Isn’t that what abstraction and interface is about? You can write the common business logic and presentation concerns, and then share it across each native implementation.
That is what web wrapping is in truth, but it’s just inneficient because of the huge surface area of web technologies.
… good? I want my applications to be consistent with the platform they run on, not with their own stupidity on other platforms.
The real reason rewrites to fix tech debt used to fail was that it took too long to get to feature partity & the goal posts moved constantly while you were on the rewrite team.
The sunk cost of existing code is no longer considered in a rewrite.
Maybe it was hard to write in the first place, but it is not hard to rewrite anymore, as long you've got decent tests.
Perhaps it will bring back native apps because supporting other platforms is less laborious.
Ref: https://docs.steambrew.app/developers/environment
time will tell if it can make it the way i like but.... it can definitely get far. Used 40% of my session limits on my $20/mo sub.
Imo it's just the only way to write software now. Opus 5.5 is better at coding than humans. Human code is slop.
It’s less nice when your web app launches that other service only when the other Tailscale node is up, because the agent interpreted your prompt as a hard access rule.
I have a couple of nice "vibe coded" apps I would never dream of releasing because I'm not interested in the QA, more than anything else. The problem is the other people who are not quite so considerate and think that what they tossed out in 15 minutes is of interest to the rest of the world. The value of a software package release now is more in the QA than the code.
Yes they do. Because it is. Anyone who cares about the quality of their product is, at minimum, carefully reviewing the output from an LLM to make sure it didn't sneak in anything crazy. More likely they are writing a lot of code by hand, because that is faster than reviewing and correcting the LLM code. Competent developers do not just hand it off and say "the AI is really good so I can trust what it put out".
But it also still writes awful code with poor maintainability if you don't keep a very close eye on it.
I feel like human code is on a wide quality spectrum. The best human code is way better than what Opus 5.5 can do. But the average code, I'm not so sure.
I'm not saying you have to be grateful to the millions of people whose work the AI you use was trained on, but why shit on them...
An experienced dev with Claude is better than either of them alone but you can't just point your agent at a repo and expect good results. And when people talk about vibe coding that's usually what they mean.
Optimizing a project with AI is one of the most trivial things you can do with AI.
I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
Once I had a good benchmark script, Opus 4.8 or whatever made my terminal app faster with less memory than ghostty and kitty. It's not even interesting.
The dark forest hypothesis is that we can't find any alien life because it's dangerous to broadcast your existence and location to competitors. So rational thing for every alien civilian to do (and arguably for us) is to keep quiet.
But what does it mean in this context?
Your "dark forest" analogy sounds reasonable but Epic's outright admission of "vibe coding" is a bit of a footgun considering how rabidly anti-AI the folks on sites like Reddit are. If they had just been like, "it's faster and supports Linux" they would be the darling of the internet.
https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3mxp...
That's not even getting to some of the "missing" features.
No Community marketplace for in-game items
No Direct player-to-player item trading
No Digital trading cards, levelling, and points shop
I hope more application developers "forget" to add these features.
Anyway, what are useful features of Steam:
- their dedication to getting Windows games running on Linux (to see off the existential threat Microsoft poses to them, but nonetheless greatly appreciated)
- community forums / screenshots / artwork / guides etc. for every product. Very useful if the game vendor doesn't have its own, and most game vendors don't
- that Steam Sales encourage vendors to offer games at much more reasonable prices (e.g. a few pounds/dollars/etc.) for what is effectively a license, revocable at any time, not a real purchase. £60? Ha ha fuck off, I'm waiting for the sale when it's £5
- also, as far as I've seen, every game distributed can still be downloaded today. People may complain that publishers update a title e.g. to remove licensed music 10 years later... but you can still download the old version with some trickery. And I've never seen Steam actively remove downloads for existing customers, I've only seen games removed from the store so no future customers
- pirates have found that most games, if their only DRM is Steamworks, are incredibly easy to crack. I am very glad Steam has convinced most publishers to use that alone and nothing worse, and I curse publishers who insist on their own DRM, their own launcher, etc. If Valve goes tits-up, I have a lot of confidence most of peoples libraries will still be playable with a little bit of cracking.
There are other useful features, even if Valve is getting rich and fat off selling gambling and day-trading to teenagers.
Fundamentally Valve has built up a lot of trust with the gaming community, and other than microtransactions and gambling, I think it's very fair to say they've been a net good for both the PC gaming community; as well as the ecosystem.
Proton is a great example.
It took them 10 years to make Linux a competetive gaming platform.
They invested in VR early and still do a lot for this niche market.
They brought back hanfheld PC from being niche chinese devices to being mainstrean and maintain support for Steam Deck for 5 years.
As game developer I do find 30% cut abysmal, but it's not any worse than consoles and I dont like Epic as a gamer for being awfully anti-consumer. I certainly dont want PC game market to be controlled by chinese Tencent subsidiaries.
...and the hardware ecosystem, too. I just got my Steam controller last week, and it's wonderful. It's so good I'm playing Civ with it. Civ! On a gamepad!
FTFY. Steam forums are a cesspoll most often than not. No, we do not want a easy accessible place where people can spew their crap on the internet. It's either moderated and useful or it shouldn't exists.
Rocket league used to have a Linux build, then epic decided to kill that off entirely.
I recently bought the steam frame. It's years past when I would have wanted this VR headset the most, but half the reason I bought it was to support Valve's R&D with Linux desktop support, arm JIT translation, etc.
People bitch and moan about "voting with your wallet", then you have a company that tons of people continually vote with their wallet for, then people complain about others defending the one company that doesn't seem to want to screw their userbase over.
Sure Steam has some blind spots for the very sweaty semi-pro gamer. I don't care about virtual stickers and little treats. I care that all my games run on my Linux desktop after years of devs not giving a shit and other companies being openly hostile.
Valves competitors suck. Their VR competitor is Meta which in a just world would not exist as an organization. Their gaming marketplace competitor is Epic, which produces the character-slop extraction shooter and a launcher that gets more annoying to use every time I open it.
The other "competitors" if you can even call them that, are microsoft who has basically deleted a dozen game studios in the last year via moneyball, and other game companies like EA and Ubisoft who routinely delete purchased games and tell the users to go suck it.
Valve is basically the only company out there who is resisting the constant urge to make everything shitty to increase investor profits. They stay private and everyone loves what they do with that power. I'm sure a ton of fail-son PE bros are dying for the chance to buy out valve and turn everything it's ever done to absolute dogshit. We'd be getting half-life 3, 4, 5, 6, mobile, etc and they'd all be shit.
I'll happily pay to have a game on Steam vs getting it for free on Epic. Steam has been a good experience for me the past 2+ decades :)
Unfortunately literally everything is wrong with EGS specifically.
Their stance on intentionally not having user reviews because consumers shouldn't have power to react to publisher or developers decisions.
Their giving away games for free and then revoking licenses then removing them from accounts even though it was purely their own fault. They were most successful company ever back then and could certainly eat that loss.
Their shitty account system that certainly got hacked multiple times because it's the only gaming platform where someone constantly trying to access my accounts even though I'm Linux and cybersecurity nerd with random 32-char passwords. They also dont have straightforward way to change account region without trying to deal with their shitty support.
Tim Sweeney decided to make a platform to fuck over gamers and we gamers returned favour.
Things nobody has said since like 2005? A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal. Especially when everyone just leaves it running anyway. There's far more significant aspects like memory usage, game library, and general features.
I could go on. Its still the only store with acceptable linux experience sadly.
When I hear about a game on social media I often want to add it to a wishlist on Steam but I dread opening the app because I know it will take forever to open on MacOS.
I don't mind a game launcher taking time, but the store is a part of that which makes it annoying I avoid the native app for that reason.
In the web world and 7-10 seconds for a pageload is forever. Same with mobile, if you tapped an app icon and it loaded that slow it would never be tolerated.
Given that its primary purposes are to start video games that take anywhere from five to thirty+ seconds to start and to download video games and their patches which range in size between many hundreds of MBs to a hundred+ GBs, the client taking roughly ten seconds to start is no problem.
Optimize where it makes sense, yanno? I'd much rather have to "deal with" the Steam client taking ten seconds to start than to have to deal with the Epic Games Launcher's download rate being limited to 100->150 mbit/s. [0]
[0] Last I checked on this was a few years ago -like twelve months after Sea Of Thieves stopped being widely popular- so it may have improved. The absurdly slow download speeds [1] are one of the bigger reasons why I stopped using EGS.
[1] Sure, many people don't have connections any faster than that. I do. Steam saturates it, and -at the time- EGS absolutely did not and occupied 100% of one logical CPU while failing to do so.
A very obvious non-deck example is how bad it can be at loading and showing videos on the store page. They consistently have issues with smooth playback, this is not my network, others i know have the same issue. it’s to the point that I scroll down and look at gifs in the description for gameplay footage first. I use the discovery queue often and it’s pretty apparent.
The upsides of having a de facto monopoly, I suppose—lamentably common story in tech.
Steam is dogshit and it’s crazy they haven’t optimised it all in 20 years.
It only looks good if you compare it to the Epic client, which somehow manages to be much worse.
But for the Steam Frame, which is probably booting while it is strapped to your face and completely obscuring your vision, every second is felt much more intensely. Anything that can be done to get to first interaction sooner has a much, much larger effect on the feel of the experience.
The speed would always have been nice to have, but it moves beyond "nice to have" for the Steam Frame case into having a significant effect on how it feels to use and the out-of-box experience. Yes, you'll use sleep most of the time, but when you do a full boot or reboot, you feel the seconds.
Epic could have benchmarked their beta client against the Steam beta client which would have shown this.
I’m curious what issues you have run into that you consider it terrible?
Just recently I learned Listary has a new beta written in Rust. It is fast! The previous one kept crashing. Asking AI to code Rust style, is probably a shortcut method.
Steam client was always fast, majority of load time is (and forever will be) network speed.
What’s the issue they have with South Africa?
It is fast though!
Truly something to be proud of..
borderline murderous eyetwitch
This feels like a strange argument given site we are on. "Why are applications so slow and bloated these days" has been a pretty constant complaint around here for many, many years.
How are you twisting more efficient software into a bad thing?
oh fucking hell, finally. thank you.
You can't really avoid a long running process for a game launcher though. It's just how they work, you need to keep track of play time and respond to any API calls from the game. But it could be a native background daemon instead of two Steam Web Helpers.
The only benefits of Tauri are the smaller application package and the fact that the runtime is always up to date (which can also be a downside). That full package doesn't live in RAM when it's running, so it's "merely" wasted disk space and not RAM. In terms of RAM it uses just as much as electron or CEF.
I disagree. I get that steam has useful features I want while in-game (e.g. invite a friend to play), but there's no reason it couldn't just run this launcher only when a steam game is running and immediately exit once it's done.
Also, I think a lot of people forget how small well written software can be -- we're talking like single or double digit megabytes. Heck there's a whole linux distro that's under 20mb.
Somebody clipping how long it takes Steam to open on their computer with no other context is pretty meaningless. For all we know, it's running slower on their computer today. There's no before/after, no comparison to Epic. Yet this article just confidently asserted the figure as universal. Moronic.
It is a simple shell for launching already downloaded apps. This is disgrace and nothing to boast about, especially considering Valve takes 30% cut of basically PC gaming marked for making it.
Again, one may argue how useful all of this is, but it is there, and most users likely have the app on a OS startup anyway.
1: https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/4299321840544...