this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
296 points (92.3% liked)
Technology
80273 readers
4490 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It kills my laptop’s battery. It doesn’t matter if it’s not using much CPU, it keeps the CPU from sleeping and thus wastes a ton of battery. This is a well-known problem with software that uses its own timers and doesn’t optimize for battery life. Thus I do not want to leave Steam running all the time and so my experience is degraded.
When I want to play a Steam game that uses DRM I need to start up Steam, log in, do multi factor authentication, then wait for Steam to do all its updates, then restart while the patches are applied, then finally get to my library so I can start the game. It’s like a 10-15 minute process that is usually enough to kill my desire to play the game in the first place, so I don’t bother.
As for DRM, well none of the games on GOG have DRM. Some Steam games have DRM, some don’t. If Valve wanted to, they could decide to stop offering DRM and then they’d be DRM free too. If developers didn’t want that they’d have to take their games off Steam and lose those sales. This would incentivize more developers to go DRM free.
But they don’t. Thus Valve benefits from DRM and so they deserve blame for it, not just the developers. You don’t get to have your cake and eat it too.
Why do you need to leave it running? Why would you have it running if you're not playing a steam game or using its overlay and controller features? You're inventing problems that don't exist because you seem to not understand how to use the software. You open it when you want to play a game. If it starts updating stuff, you pause it or cancel it. Why would you blame steam for developers pushing updates in the first place? Turn off updates, boom problem solved. Like yeah, gog is better in their DRM stance but galaxy is not great software, and updates are important for modern games that ship largely broken and unoptimized, and the gog offline installers do not make updating easy. You're holding a fork and complaining that it makes for a shitty knife, like yeah bud, you're using it wrong.
I explained why it needs to be left running: because opening it is too much of a hassle to even bother with. Thus I don’t, and I don’t plan to open it any time soon.
GOG Galaxy is a nonsequitur. I’ve never installed it and it’s never been required to download or play any game. I use GOG’s website to buy and download games. Galaxy might as well not exist and I’m fine with that.