Can we get a steam lite version?

[kabbrac]

The launcher takes upwards of 30 seconds to launch and takes up a huge amount of resources (500-600mb of ram), and constantly chewing up bandwidth in the background..there is no need for this.. my windows 11 install is only taking up 1.5gb ram ..why does steam need so much resources? whats going on in the background? ..I have linux desktops that only take up 300mb of ram or less with Xorg/Wayland running...I know we can use the no browser option when launching but still ..this seems a bit ridiculous..please give us a no frills low resource version of steam.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

View > Small Mode

[kabbrac]

Originally posted by cSg|mc-Hotsauce:

View > Small Mode

:qr:

That makes the window small but does nothing for the 8 instances/process threads of steam running in the background taking up huge resources...not to mention that you have to launch the beast to even use that option unless you use the no browser option at launch.

My computer is no slouch ..but i cringe everytime i look at the process tree and see that steam is taking up more ram than my entire linux desktop... and 1/3rd of the ram that windows 11 uses.

[kabbrac]

Its almost like we are running Steam OS in the background of our already running OS...might as well be anyways.

[[?]legit]

This sounds good to me.

[Zefar]

Do you have it on a SSD?

Also if you run Win11 you should have rather up to date hardware unless you bypassed those reqs.
Any hardware in the past 5 years should not have an issue with Steam.

[Dr.Shadowds 🐉]

I think be alright, but they have to alter things to cut less things need to load, which basically they have two types of clients really.

For current work around:
Try this add -no-browser to steam target on shortcut, now it cut out basically lot of your web support, and switch to small mode like you wanted, now it lighter.

Draw back is being unable to uninstall, and have to launch Steam normally without the -no-browser, and go full mode to see your library in web interface.

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

Yeah, the Steam client is rather bloated.

This is why I normally run Steam with the -no-browser launch parameter. It cuts out all the "steamwebhelper" nonsense. Sure, the Library doesn't work, but it's not like the Library UI is any good these days; I can just use Small Mode to launch things and Big Picture Mode to uninstall things and manage game settings.

If the Steam client still had the old Library UI, that stuff could run without needing the browser-based processes. But Valve was silly and threw it out and made everything browser-dependent.

Browsers are infamous for being resource hogs and the Steam client using such to display things is no exception.

Though, if we're gonna be proposing a lite version of Steam, I'd just go all the way and suggest that there ought to be a way to launch games (including DRM checks!) entirely via command line. So there would no longer be a need for any GUI...and furthermore people could then also design any GUI they wanted to use with the command line interface!

[Black Blade]

I do agree possibly a new small mode will be good for everyone