This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Faster at what?
While developing the "slow" Steam store, Valve contributed to the make Linux a viable gaming platform. What were you cunts doing while this was happening? Shouting from the sidelines that Linux gaming was never going to work due to fragmentation and minimal use base.
Wankers.
They were purchasing studios and removing Linux clients from games that already had native clients
Yeah, I don't really remember it but I know they were not helpful at all.
I've seen Linux gaming evolve from having nearly zero games, through the Loki ports giving us some hope, to Steam games basically working nearly seamlessly by using Wine/Proton as an impedance layer.
Valve always treated me well as a customer, but most importantly contributed back to the community.
These idiots now present themselves with a slop coded piece of junk and say "Look how fast this thing starts!"
I would slap them silly with a wet handdock if I could.
I never heard about that. Was it due to moving the games to their own storefront that had no Linux support? Or straight up removed it with no sensible explanation? Got any specific games in mind?
Rocket League was one
I believe it was delisted on steam as well, but it still removed support for players at the time
Yes, we're all very desperate to leave the Steam ecosystem, we're just waiting for ... checks notes ... a slightly faster launcher.
Yes, that's it: a slightly faster launcher.
No, no. You forgot about this:
The announcement post also warns that the vibe-coded Preview is currently “light on features”
So a slightly faster launcher that is light on features!
Wait, light on features? That's the current EGS, lol. What else are they gonna shave off? Launching a game? The UI so it is now in a command line? The whole store?
That's actually a great feature. To be able to type launch from my terminal and not see the store...
Fuzzy matching and list completion would even make it better - that could even tie into a store link.
launch rocket gets you two games you own in a list and 3 marked with a store icon. Boom!
Over to you, Valve
That sounds like an awful lot of features to implement.
Not that many, but it would still be cool. They could roadmap it and iterate. A person can dream
I'm sorry Steam, is not you. But that new launcher is so slightly faster... I can't resist.
hahaha They give away games and people still do not switch. Why is that?
Because their launcher wasn't fast enough, obviously!
Exemplary example of how tech bros think
tbh it was a legitimate issue with the epic launcher the last time i used it: everything loaded for three seconds each time since it was some sort of prohibitively bloated framework web app
Yeah it legit took more than a minute to launch the fucking barebone app, that's the reason most people haven't been using the store. It's definitely because the launch speed is so so slow that people not using it, good on them to make it usable, now maybe fix the other thing.
The hilarious part is, yes, I don't care how fast my launcher is.
But... also, Steam is by far the slowest, least responsive program on my computer.
"Faster than Steam" feels like a joke.
I don't use a lot of non-open source applications (and not a lot of desktop applications generally). Have they gotten so bad that the slowness of Steam doesn't feel bad to people anymore?
I think it's just a select few people that have issues with Steam. I've never once thought or felt that steam was slow. Some games start up slow, but that's not because of Steam. Just using the program is quite responsive.
My gaming just happens on a SteamDeck. There I do not feel the launcher slow. Is it a Windows thing?
The best part is Steam released an update just one day later that loads faster than the Slopic Launcher.
I've heard news that Steam released the update before Epic announced the new launcher
Yeah it was available in the beta branch already
Faster at being a shitty platform does not make it a better platform. Just a faster one.
Do people have issues with steam launcher being slow?
Not for me.
No. The update process can be a tad bit slow sometimes, but the as actual usage etc. is very fine.
Epic Games on the other hand I had countless times of installing or just starting where it would just ramp up system resources and wouldn't get going.
Nope.
I love steam but I have to admit it's rather slow both on Windows and Linux.
Isn't steam kind of web based and so always a bit slow because of that ?
I guess I can't really relate. Games usually launch within 3-5 seconds for me. Sometimes it can take longer when it has to do whatever it does with vulkan shaders, but that's usually only first time launches or after some updates.
Steam is significantly slower to open that Heroic or Lutris.
On my old pc it take about 30 second from PC finished booting to launching Steam in Big Picture, not sure what happened because on my new PC it just launched within second.
Sometimes big picture but I only use it for like 10 seconds then launch my game.
Wish it was faster sure.
I do, but there is an issue with lauchers in general. Not just steam.
On a semi-related note, anyone using a self-hosted Steam-like experience like Drop OSS or similar? I’ve been meaning to try out Drop because my family has a few gaming machines that would benefit from the ease of a store like Steam, but I refuse run anything with DRM or to let any games or clients like Steam have an internet connection to collect data.
Probably because it has so few features.
But the new “Preview” app “will have some bugs,” Epic warns.
I'm glad I didn't pay for any of the games on it, makes it really easy to just uninstall and never go back ☺️
Like the launcher or not, this will lead to more in roads for games made in Unreal to be able to have native Linux builds
They removed native Linux ports from games and updated others so they would no longer work on Linux or in proton. They made it this way.
