Marking this as a feature request.
Frankly, 130MB isn't huge by modern standards. Big, sure...but not huge.
As for the frequency of updates, it'd be a pretty safe bet to assume that once the beta is over, the updates will roll out less frequently.
It's moving around right now because we're making lots of changes. Like MrSchism said, it will calm down once we go out of beta.
@slouken has addressed this, at least in part here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/1293#issuecomment-13166139
Well, Firefox - a fully fledged browser - is more than half that size. Stripping all your binaries and libraries should make a pretty substantial difference for the effort it takes to do; all you lose is debugging symbols, which isn't really needed for public builds.
Thank you for the reference to STEAM_RUNTIME and confirmation of the issue. c:
@alexwh Steam ships with a fully fledged embedded browser - libcef.
@johndrinkwater Is it redownloaded every build?
As a side note, I made a small miscalculation: Firefox is 50MB installed, 20 packed. Steam otoh is 130 packed, 298ish installed.
Not trying to bash, just pointing out this problem and a (partial) quick fix.
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta#announcements/detail/1748790515449094039 should make you smile, ‘Reduced the size of the Steam Runtime by 50%’
Anyone else reading this find this ironic? 5 years later and it's still redownloading 100+ MB on each update, issue not having been addressed at all.
The updates for the Steam client are huge - like ~130MB huge.
Can't these updates be compressed or cut down a little more? Do we really need to ship openssl, drivers, docs and other packages that can just be added as a dependency (and will most likely be already installed anyway)?
The main Steam binary is only 5MB, but can be
stripped to 3.7 (this'll also lower memory footprint).It's also pretty inconvenient for capped bandwidth users that need to download an update that large once a week or more.