> The Steam client is terrible

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.

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.

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.

It was a planned update since long before. Just a coincidence in timelines.

> Ok but why didn't they do it sooner? The Steam client is terrible and there is no excuse for it.

It's bad, but I wouldn't call it terrible.

It does have unresolved annoyances, like how context menus randomly stop working on Linux, and tweaking that setting (whose name I forget) on/off does little to fix them. You have to resort to using Big Picture mode, which is annoying. If they ever fix this, I'd have zero problems with the Steam client.

Mostly though I don't care about the client, I care about the games and they work seamlessly in Linux!

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.

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.

Disagree. It does what I need it to do. The store might be slow but my games work great.