Without any flashy marketing campaigns or social media fanfare, Valve rolled out a routine Steam Client update containing a very simple line in the patch notes: “Improved Steam Client startup performance.”
Without any flashy marketing campaigns or social media fanfare, Valve rolled out a routine Steam Client update containing a very simple line in the patch notes: “Improved Steam Client startup performance.”
I open steam exactly once, then never again until I restart my computer. Why would this even matter.
I don’t get this mentality. Every little performance optimization matters. It might save 1s or even less for you, but coupled with hundreds of thousands of users, it saves a some amount of CPU time.
This is why competition is good. Being blindly loyal to a brand and defending their shit only benefits the companies.
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.
Some people get stuck on performance numbers that don’t matter. Like Linux users that say they want 5second boot time instead of 8. Why? 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.
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.
tvs with webOS or macs people turn on usually are sleeping, so that 1 second startup is not really a boot. My nixos laptop turns “on” in about 1 second if it is sleeping…but I get what you are saying, it would be amazing yo have that fast of a cold boot
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 spend like 30 seconds prior to booting to “train my RAM” or whatever. DDR5 feels like a massive step backwards to the 90s.
I think you might be able to skip that if you want to - if you know at what timings your RAM works fine at (probably the values your PC uses while working, there are tools for looking that up), you can probably just set it in your BIOS and be done with it.
I had to wait an hour to boot on Windows 10 LTSC. Not the first machine I owned with that problem, either.
File system check?
Ran it regularly before and after the scheduled update every three months. Also ran a scheduled CHKDSK and DISM. Basically took a full day for routine updates. Cleared temporary files and unused AppData. Defragmented. I also frequently flushed DNS cache.
The fact that it’s not an issue with any individual hardware should have tipped you off that it’s not an “error” but just the way Windows is. You can find unresolved forums posts about this kind of issue going back to the early days of Windows 7 if you search.
If anybody is stupid enough to still use windows this is my advice: Enable the Hibernate option. It saves the RAM to disk and then resumes from there on startup, skipping any issues.
I actually suspect it started on the LTSC copy specifically after the Windows Store was installed, which cannot be undone.
I run Linux for everything at home…after W10 came out. But work issue machines are Windows. They have never had boot issues…they have a shit ton of other quirks though.
Public relations, pride, vengeance?
Companies often take actions which don’t directly improve the product for customers but instead offer benefits to the company. Typing that out in 2026 is… It’s nice that it isn’t pure enshittification for once.
Because not everyone is you?
Also devices like steam deck and steam machine.
I actually kinda hate that steam is always running.
I get the reasons why, but I would rather just have like a steam updater daemon than the full app running, and would also prefer that Steam starts quickly unless you catch it during the daemon’s start up.
The other use case is for HTPC I do not like Big Picture mode as my “home” experience. If you open Steam with game scope it goes into big picture automatically, so it’s designed for Steam Machine experiences and not HTPC. The new screensaver feature (which is in beta, so should improve) uses a lot of GPU and polls CPU frequently, so it’s actually a bit annoying to have running. I would rather use a more native launcher than the Big Picture mode experience, so you end up having to watch the opening animation frequently to mask the slow startup.
Again, this is pretty mild, and I don’t think even PS5 provides a large improvement.
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)
TIL, no I haven’t tried it, and I’ll have to see how it works out
If I can run that as a background thing and open games directly it would be a nice experience
I haven’t really messed with it, only tried it once to see if the command worked and it did
I’m pretty sure this no longer works. The minigameslist is no longer available and almost all components are implemented using CEF
Edit: wait wait wait is small mode back??
Edit 2: apparently it was never gone and I’m just stupid lol
When I did my quick Google search, I did see a few reddit posts along the lines of “where did small mode go?!” So maybe they did briefly get rid of it before bringing it back because of backlash.
For you it wouldn’t really matter much. It is a big improvement and very much noticeable, but it matters much more for people like me that only runs Steam when I’m about to play a game through it which can happen several times a day.
You guys are restarting your computers?
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.
Sleeping doesnt work on my device
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.
Power bill too high. It’s easy to turn it off when 8 go to bed.
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.
You never boot your computer until you reboot it either, yet if it took 10+ minutes to boot like a PC would many years ago, you’d complain.
More performance is almost always more better, unless you’re on embedded devices where binary sizes matter, but for us on desktops with comparatively abundant resources, why moan about a free improvement?
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
Thankfully, the only company that I believe has ever made an attempt to make something load faster by making it functionally worse is Microsoft with Windows Fast-Startup.
“Ah yes, I know how to make their OS load faster… We’ll just never shut it down!” - That’s Microsoft-tier intelligence right there.
No, I do not believe that Valve would make their storefront worse in any sense just to beat Epic Games; they frankly couldn’t give less of a shit, because they know that the EGL is not competition.
Somebody thought they Kobayashi Maru’d performance optimization
I don’t know but Steam (or any other app) stealing focus was a really big pet peeve of mine. Glad it’s allegedly fixed.
Letting arbitrarily executing code run persistently is a security/privacy risk, for those who care.
I trust steam more, but I hate that discord does this stuff.
Also its probably bug territory, but steam always fucking opens big picture if you press the home button any time its running with a controller, even in the background.
Like I get they probably focused on steam deck UX for their incredibly helpful push to linux, but the dev in me can’t help but be pissed off they implemented it so lazily.
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.
Thats why I call it lazy not malicious, any other company and it’d be a focus stealing dark pattern.
I usually map the home button in emulators, or if I need an extra key.
Itd make sense for steamos to have that default, but the setting has been enforced by default for like a decade
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
Valid. I think a lot of people do this. I may be an outlier, I don’t like having launchers open unless I need them open, so I close them whenever I’m done gaming.
if you notice a 5ms delay in steam bootup times it might mean there’s a virus