i support your idea. valve does not seem to care. there is gog however and their offline installers. there is some steam games that does not require steam to run.

many of the older games will run without steam

if you install them with steam on a new pc, and transfer them to another drive/pc they can run

how old is your old PC?
I have 12 years old, 4 cores Athlon with Radeon R7 240 running Ubuntu. Steam works perfectly. Many old games work on it. I play Sturmovik 1946 on it, but even newer games work, like Portal.
I don't see much reason why Steam would not work on old PC with Linux.

I still have a couple of dual-cores going, like my trusty Celeron E3400@3ghz / 4gb ram / HD 4670 1gb / budget sata ssd running Lubuntu at my parents house, latest steam client runs great and good to reminisce with HL2 mods and the good old X3 series from egosoft...

hello
It's something that have been discussed so many time that i do not have anought fingers to count it 's definitively not a good solution for both side ( user and steam) talking about a legacy client as exemple.( windows 7 user here )

In theory it would be nice but also largely pointless.
a good mate of mine is running Win10 LTSC 2019 on C2D E8400, 4GB RAM and GMA X4500 (ofc they got an SSD upgrade) but yet the OS runs just fine and so is Steam.

What computer are you using that Win10 or Linux cannot run on it?

Proton is a modded version of W.I.N.E. W.I.N.E. Is Not an Emulator.

The problem with Linux is that it heavily relies on Vulkan for gaming. Old hardware does not support it.

引用自 Omega：

The problem with Linux is that it heavily relies on Vulkan for gaming. Old hardware does not support it.

hello

Not really agree about that :

ex for my case , running w7 and gtx 1060 , i am stuck with an os that does not support dx12 natively and our drivers 474.x does not support vulkan 1.3 but moving to linux will open me the full capability of playing dx12 games and vulkan 1.3 native game, which is atm not possible xd

引用自 bidulless：

引用自 Omega：

The problem with Linux is that it heavily relies on Vulkan for gaming. Old hardware does not support it.

hello

Not really agree about that :

ex for my case , running w7 and gtx 1060 , i am stuck with an os that does not support dx12 natively and our drivers 474.x does not support vulkan 1.3 but moving to linux will open me the full capability of playing dx12 games and vulkan 1.3 native game, which is atm not possible xd

That is still supported modern hardware, not legacy.

引用自 Omega：

引用自 bidulless：

hello

Not really agree about that :

ex for my case , running w7 and gtx 1060 , i am stuck with an os that does not support dx12 natively and our drivers 474.x does not support vulkan 1.3 but moving to linux will open me the full capability of playing dx12 games and vulkan 1.3 native game, which is atm not possible xd

That is modern hardware, not legacy stuff.

hello
And also running steam from april 2023 because, well why not ; gtx1060 is not really what we can call new hardware (2016)

ya, it's kinda weird that steam doesn't even support OS that valves own games run on.

You can use SteamCMD or DepotDownloader on Github [github.com] to download the game files via a terminal. As far as I know these tools are unable to launch the games but the old games usually aren't protected by SteamDRM. So you can just straight up launch the .exe instead.

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引用自 kingjames488：

ya, it's kinda weird that steam doesn't even support OS that valves own games run on.

Not weird at all. Software evolves. Steam is and always has been a dependency for Valve's games (post-HL2).

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As for "old games don't run on modern hardware", yeah. Of course they don't. What did you expect? In the future old versions of Windows could be emulated or the games themselves could run through compability layers such as Wine and Proton. In fact you can do it as we speak. It's no issue. Old Windows games tend to run better under compability layers so it's a win-win.

引用自 Quint：

As for "old games don't run on modern hardware", yeah. Of course they don't.

where did I even say that?

also steam still works on my win7 PC despite steam no longer supporting it and actively deleting the steam.exe...

edit: oh good, seems steam saw my posts and stopped hyperlinking steam.exe

引用自 kingjames488：

where did I even say that?

Sorry the remaining paragraphs were not meant for you. I did not see a "rod" in formatting options so instead of making a seperate reply I just continued. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

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EDIT: Found the "rod".