Resplendent606

It is awesome that you looked into the phone number carry over history! That is exactly the kind of forced change that everyone thought would be impossible or “iffy” until it became law. Now, we can’t imagine a world without it.

To your point about the difficulty: the reason it feels “iffy” is that we’ve let these stores build walled gardens. The EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) is already solving this for other tech sectors. It mandates that gatekeepers provide APIs for Real-Time Data Portability.

If Valve was designated a gatekeeper, they wouldn’t have to hand out keys manually, they would just have to allow a secure, standardized way for you to prove to GOG or Epic that you own the game.

You are right that GOG is doing great work, but the reason their Library Integration is often buggy is that they are scraping data that Steam doesn’t want to share. My point is that we should not have to rely on GOG’s clever workarounds. We should have the legal right to our own data.

If we move from a world of stores to a world of protocols (like email or phone numbers), the best product wins because it is actually better, not because it is holding a $2,000 library hostage.

I appreciate the civil discussion, but I think you’re confusing “convenience” with “freedom.”

You mentioned adding non-Steam games, but that’s just a shortcut. You lose the “Join Game” buttons, the cloud saves, and the lobby invites. That is the definition of a social moat. You can leave, but you’re socially penalized for doing so.

As for competition, the fact that GOG and Itch.io have to hide in tiny niches just to survive proves my point. When the #1 player has 75%+ of the market, they don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be too big to leave.

My solution of mandated interoperability is exactly how we fixed the phone industry. You can switch carriers and keep your number. We should be able to switch launchers and keep our friends and games. If Steam is truly as perfect as you say, they should have nothing to fear from a system where users are actually free to leave. A benevolent gatekeeper who refuses to unlock the gate is still a gatekeeper.

The idea that they don’t use tricks is not true. Valve’s “Price Parity” rules stop other stores from competing on price. For instance, if a dev tries to pass their 12% Epic savings onto the customer, Valve can kick them off Steam, where 75% of their revenue lives. That is a massive underhanded leverage.

Also, it is not just about making a better product. It is switching costs. Because our libraries and social circles are locked into a proprietary ecosystem, we aren’t choosing Steam every day. We are just stuck there.

The solution is not for a competitor to build a “more perfect Steam,” that is impossible because Valve has a 20 year head start on our data. The solution is mandated interoperability.

We need a system where:

• Digital ownership is portable. If I buy a game, I should be able to launch it on any client, not just the one I bought it from. My library shouldn’t be hostage to one company.
• Social graphs are open. I should be able to chat with my Steam friends from a different launcher, just like I can email a Gmail user from an Proton account.
• Price competition is legal. We need to ban the Price Parity rules that stop other stores from offering lower prices.

We did this with cell phone numbers (you can keep your number when you switch carriers) and the EU has been doing this with messaging apps. There’s no reason we should not do it for our multi-thousand-dollar game libraries.

We did this with cell phone numbers so you could switch carriers without losing your identity. They are doing it with messaging apps in Europe so you can text a WhatsApp user from a different app. There is no reason we should accept anything less for a digital library worth thousands of dollars. The goal isn’t to kill Steam, it is to make Steam actually compete for our loyalty every day instead of just relying on the fact that we’re too locked-in to leave.

Edit: fixed final paragraph.

Raw wealth doesn’t matter as much as market capture. Valve makes more money per employee than almost any company in history. They don’t need Microsoft’s billions because they already own the toll booth for the entire PC industry. When you control the only road everyone has to drive on, you don’t need to be the biggest car company.

Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/valve-makes-almost-usd50-million-per-employee-raking-in-more-cash-per-person-than-google-amazon-or-microsoft-gaming-giants-350-employees-on-track-to-generate-usd17-billion-this-year

Just because they haven’t used the power they have doesn’t mean they should have it. A benevolent monopoly is still a monopoly, and we’re essentially just betting that a billionaire’s interests will always align with ours.

The Gaben worship is just PR for a monopoly.

This is so relatable.

Whenever I see a new project trying to modernize Xorg, my first question is whether it’s actually about the code or just another protest/spite project. We’ve already seen how XLibre is less about display servers and more about a weird crossover of technical incompetence and fringe politics (championed by people like Lunduke). Is Phoenix actually a serious technical effort, or is it just the latest attempt to build a sanctuary for people who were kicked out of the Wayland and Xorg dev circles?

Using the official Valve repository is my preferred method because it provides a direct line to the developers, ensuring you get the latest GPG keys and installer updates immediately without waiting for them to make their way through the Debian maintainers. While the Debian repo is convenient, it requires you to enable contrib and non-free components globally across your entire system. The method I suggested adds Steam as a specific source without cluttering your main package list with other non-free software. This also makes the installation more consistent across different versions of Debian. Whether you are on Stable or Testing, you are not at the mercy of Debian’s specific package transitions or library freezes, which can occasionally break the Steam bootstrap process in the community-maintained version. I do not believe either way is better, just different for different types of users.

Here is how I install Steam on Debian:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386  
sudo apt update  
sudo apt install curl  
curl -s http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/archive/stable/steam.gpg | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg > /dev/null  
echo 'deb [arch=amd64,i386 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg] http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ stable steam' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/steam.list  
sudo apt update  
sudo apt install steam -y  

Edit: Added a fancy block.

Cinnamon is where it is at. Also, I am happy you found something you like. 👍

Thank you for the great reply. I am not saying one way is better but coming from Debian that was very foreign to me. I have a lot of respect for Slackware and people who use it.

Here is what I don’t understand about Slackware. Why does the installer recommend on installing everything. Not just a few applications most people might need. It recommends everything. Of course you can do a more minimalist installation but the installer recommends against it. Every application possible.

So, KDE Plasma but even more bugs?

edit: I was kidding. The “KDE is buggy” meme has been a long-standing joke on top of Wayland having a reputation of not running well for many Linux users, especially NVIDIA users.