Are there any open source Steam clients? Maybe it can be like Heroic, because desktop Steam is technically browser with specific website opened.
Steam and Valve has great Linux support, but it would be interesting to try alternative open source client.
because desktop Steam is technically browser with specific website opened.
The Steam client does use Chromium Embedded Framework for its interface, but there’s a lot more to it than just that. For example, Steam Input, Steam Overlay, Steamworks, and Steam Play (aka Proton) which itself is a collection of of nontrivial components.
If you just want an alternative launcher, there is Lutris, but there is no stand-alone Steam client alternative as far as I know.
It might be interesting to see how much functionality could be replicated in an open-source client. Some components, like DXVK and a web engine, are readily available. Others, like Steamworks, are not. SteamDB shows that it’s possible to inspect Steam’s game repositories, but actually downloading from them without Steam (or steamcmd) might be challenging. Goldberg Emulator shows that it’s possible to fool some games into thinking Steam is running, but that’s not enough to run games that include DRM.
Anyone attempting this would have to weigh the time they spend reverse engineering and re-implementing against the fact that Steam can always change its internal services, rendering all that time and effort wasted. And, of course, there would always be a risk that anyone using it (without explicit permission from Valve) might have their account banned.
The only open source client that I know that worked with Steam is for bridging Steam’s chats and notifications with IRC. It’s called Bitlbee.
And i’ve stopped using it a few years ago because IIRC it was a pain to keep the authentication working with Steam. They thought hackers were accessing my account or something like that, and I kept having to disable security “features” just in order to stay logged in.
I assume an open source client not endorsed by Steam would have the same issue.
Does this work well on Linux? Looks like it’s dotnet based
Also, the readme says it requires windows
Don’t know if that client specifically works on Linux but .NET supports Linux out of the box since many years.
The interface “running” is one thing, but does it know to run games in wine/proton? Does it know to grab the Linux versions of games if available? Mono doesn’t make that automatic.
Lutris is another one like playnite that is designed specifically for Linux using gtk. Like playnite, it collates all (most?) of the major game clients like steam, ea and epic. It works pretty well from my experience.
I do not remember the name, but there was one being developed and the UI was made with QT. I don’t know if it used it’s own method to download games or was just a GUI for steamcmd.
