This annoys me too, not only with Steam. But I thought this is an issue on my operating system. I wasn't aware this could be solved by the client side.

please understand, they're a starving indie company

Steam stays winning

I can't wait! I'm really going to notice a 0.1s faster restore time.

That's just a "uses more memory whilst minimised."

In terms of graphical features, sure, probably. In my (admittedly limited) experience Source games tend to have much better performance and modding, which I find much more important.

The licensing for source is better than unreal. Its only stipend it has to be published on steam. (Which you're most likely to do anyway) while unreal requires 5% royalities over 1mil gross revenue (outside of epic store, which lets be real... wont account for much)

every unreal game i’ve played since UE3 has run worse than it’s contemporaries :c

I let it run constantly and never really noticed the load time. Good to hear it is so quick now!

We have some of this, but it's usually to ensure that some system or hardware is available.

We're a kiosk app on android so get started automatically on boot, and sometimes storage isn't available so we have to delay before loading our config or we get errors.

You may think this is a joke, but people will start complaining if a program is too fast.

Or a sorts car owner that never does track days but likes to tell you their car can do 240km/h...when we have 120km/h road limits.

Yeah, but to be fair that V10 Lamborghini Huracán can get up to that speed limit much more quickly than my budget-sports-car Scion tC can. Besides, how are we supposed to know how small their penis is unless they rev their engine up so loud it hurts everyone’s ears?

Boot times are such a arbitrary performance statistic. My Nobara machine boots quite fast, but i had to put a 30s timeout for my array of hard drives in the fstab to make sure they get mounted correctly. That's not the fault of the OS, it's a hardware limitation that can't really be worked around at all.

I had to wait an hour to boot on Windows 10 LTSC. Not the first machine I owned with that problem, either.

I don't care for a 5 second boot time instead of 8, but I understand the desire to work towards a sub 1 second type of boot, even if it's still farcical. We are surrounded by other tech like laptops, phones and TVs which go from standby to on in an instant, and as a PC user, where one puts personal stake in their PC being on par or better, chasing minimal times here matters.

I'm sure many people know the feeling of their Linux PC or pride of place mechanical keyboard modded ThinkPad suddenly looking crap to a casual tech user with a different understanding of what quality means. While the MacBook user may never gain the features of your device, you may theoretically beat them at their preferences, because you can technically do anything.

I'm eyeing up an oled monitor upgrade in the next few years. When I get it, I'm gonna use an old raspberry pi to basically make a simple, lightweight dupe of my PC desktop, then use a HDMI switch to have the oled screen have an instant useful boot while the apC actually boots in the background. My desk doesn't face a part of my apartment otherwise used, so I may get a motion sensor too, so being at my desk turns on the pi's "always on" display, which has the dual purpose of obscuring the PC boot. I don't need this in any way, but it'll feel 𝓈𝓁𝑒𝑒𝓀, and I want that.

Have you tried small mode? It's a built-in option.

https://www.howtogeek.com/694531/how-to-reduce-steams-ram-usage-from-400-mb-to-60-mb/

https://www.xbitlabs.com/blog/mini-steam/

(The instructions are Windows-centric, but the process is pretty much the same on Linux I think. You can figure it out)

Power bill too high. It's easy to turn it off when 8 go to bed.

Sleeping doesnt work on my device

My windows work laptop (company provided it and won't let me install linux for "safety reasons"; same reasons why they ask me to use chrome instead of firefox, btw): hey, so I know you're right now working but I just downloaded an update and you know what? I'm restarting now.

Gotta restart when updating, I want that new kernel and services!

I ran into a Mesa bug a while back where after sleeping my computer, I would come back to find all the fans spinning full speed, everything is hot, and it's completely locked up. After that happened a couple times I stopped sleeping my computer and started turning it off at night.

every time I finish using it I switch it off, I might not use my PC the next day, or if so it will be late in the day, I can often go 2 or 3 days and don't start it, attending to a few things I need via my phone.

You can turn off steam using a certain controller type (or all) but by default it takes them over. It can cause problems with some software, and apparently doesn't leave controllers in the same state afterwards.

Works well for me though, the only time I use controllers is for steam games and it handles all the mapping/customization pretty well

The home button behavior is on purpose and has been there since the first steam controller. If steam is not open it opens steam, if it is then it opens big picture mode. I've only ever had it happen when not in a game so unless you are trying to open something like the Xbox game bar or using the button as your own shortcut I'm not sure when you would run into that problem. Sucks there isnt a setting to turn it off though I guess. Sorry bud.

It depends if it's a free improvement or not. If this improved time to open the window at the cost of deferring loading some important functionality it might be a net loss for example

I was thinking more along the lines of using it as a marketing gimmick on Epics side. If the difference is massive then sure, but why would a user care if the difference is small. There comes a point when you won't notice how long it takes to open because it is fast enough for you to immediately just start thinking of why you opened the program in the first place.

Competition is very good, but competing with meaningless metrics is not really competing is it. The vibecoded slop shop isn't exactly a paragon of monopoly busting consumer loving underdogs.