First, I want to say that this is about the Steam Client, not Valve or Steam the company. I actually like Valve quite a lot. However their stupid ass client pisses me the fuck off. So I shall go down the list of problems I have with Steam's client.

1. Chromium

Probably my least severe issue with Steam, I use plenty of Electron and CEF applications that are good. The only thing I don't like about them is the amount of RAM they use, and that goes for the Steam Client too. So out of the gate, Steam is already a RAM hog. I wish however, that was it's only issue...

2. Decompression

Have you ever been using your computer and all the sudden is slows down to an absolute crawl. There's a good chance it's because of Steam's stupid as fuck compression system for Downloads.

The downloads themselves aren't the worst, but once they're actually finished downloading, the client decides it's a great idea to use ALL your fucking cores and threads to decompress the game. And no, you cannot set the number of cores it uses.

This wouldn't be so much of a problem if it was a fast algorithm like gzip or lz4, however whatever algorithm they use is SLOW, like, LZMA slow (Which is what I think it's using), so it'll use your cores for a longer time than it needs to. And if it is LZMA/xz, that's absolutely fucking idiotic. Most games consist of mostly binary files, they aren't going to have good compression ratios to begin with. So just use the fastest algorithm valve!

3. Fossilize

Have you ever been using your computer and... you get the idea. Valve decides it's a great idea to enable Fossilize by default. What's Fossilize? It's a Vulkan shader """background""" processor. Just like with the Download decompression, valve has decided it's a fantastic idea to use all your cores and threads. At least with this, you can turn it off, and only have do it before launching a game.

4. Auto-updates

I hate auto-updates. They slow my network to a crawl, and most importantly you CAN'T TURN THEM OFF!!! Why in the fuck can I not turn it off?! I guess I'm fortunate I have gigabit internet, but I guess fuck all the people with slow internet. The only way to stop it is to either close the client, or make a conscious effort to pause the downloads every day. Stupid as hell.

5. The Store

This used to be a bigger problem. Nowadays on Steam, there are a lot of porn games. That's fine and dandy I guess, I don't understand anyone who is dumb enough to actually pay for porn, but it's not my money. The problem is that you used to only be able to filter nudity. Like, it was a binary thing, you either were shown no games with nudity or ALL games with nudity. And with games being more open to showing a tit/dick or two every once and a while (Not necessarily in a sexual way.), it meant I had to leave nudity on or I could miss out on some cool games just because at one point it showed a boob.

Nowadays they have an option to not to filter games with nudity where sexual content isn't the focus. So, bye bye Sakura games! Won't miss you!

But of course, another issue with the store is that it's full of shovel-ware. It's easy to figure out what is, and isn't shovel-ware, but it still wastes my time.

6. DRM

You don't actually own any of the games on Steam. Not much more to be sad about it. I encourage indie developers to also put their games on Itch or GOG.

In Conclusion

I hate the steam client. It has only gotten worse and more bloated as the years has gone on. It's at the point where Steam is no longer an essential piece of software I install on all my computers. Hell, I barely even launch it anymore, due to all the problems above. Even as I type this, Steam is using 1.8 Gigabytes of RAM doing... nothing. Fuck this software.