Can people stop crapping in this thread? We Windows 7 fans don't care about your nay-saying, your uninformed conceptions and misguided opinions. Put bluntly, put a cork in your piehole and take your nonsense elsewhere!
I wasn't crapping the thread, though... I simply pointed an opportunity for Valve to grab some of those migrating from Windows 7 into their own operating system, since one of the chief complaints about newer versions of Windows is that they have a larger footprint which hurts gaming performance. You may not take it, but Valve might convince some people to do so - and that is probably for the greater good.
Steam is 'stupidly laggy' because of cr*p like social media integration, self-promotion, auto-playing videos, etc, than anything remotely related to the OS version. Reality check - Steam still uses the "old" Win32/64 API which is actually far less bloated than W10 exclusive UWP API. (The number of UWP apps I've seen for simple stuff like fan controllers or calculators that are 10x the size of what they're replacing whilst claiming to "do away with legacy bloat" is comical...) Lack of XP compatibility for Steam is due to compiling for newer VCRedist, etc, versions (Microsoft only support as far back as Vista for VC2022), not because Valve 'debloated' anything with a magic wand they day they dropped XP support. Even GOG Galaxy suffers the same thing for the same reason - social media integration, import plugins for every other store for that "Meta-Client" experience, etc. Conversely, GOG offline installers don't need any client at all at which point the same games on the same OS (inc W7) start up lightning fast, almost as if the problem is "bloated clients are trendy because muh cheevements and Facebook and Twitter and Discord and...", etc, rather than be anything remotely to do with the OS version (or the games)...
tl:dr - Blaming older lightweight OS's for modern social media centric software bloat is like arguing "wearing huge pants make you fat".
Almost all of the features you brought up are simply basic webpage functionality. Runtime isn't going to cause issues, as you've said yourself, Windows 7 is still compatible with the latest version of the Visual C++ runtime. In fact, you can run Steam without the browser functionality by appending
-no-browser to the shortcut, that way it doesn't load CEF and it becomes very fast with only a ~ 30 MB RAM footprint, the downside is that almost nothing works other than the mini mode. Chat (social media integration as you've brought up) actually still works without CEF, it simply reverts to the older 2010 UI's chat window.
Steam extensively relies on CEF. Once CEF stops working on Windows 7, so will Steam. Even the game library is, in fact, a web application:
Valve extended the functionality of Steam to allow Windows XP to run it for a while longer by deliberately letting it get out of date back then. I recall they left it on Chromium 49 for quite a while back then... and eventually it just wasn't keeping up with most of the internet (and Steam's pages themselves), then they dropped it.
Anyhow, a lot of the pro-Steam arguments I see is that it's an easy-to-use, social gaming platform, and that Epic doesn't offer the same degree of integration. Which really makes it a contradicting argument, IMO.
