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Comment by klibertp | Hacker News Reader

I'm saying you don't need to publish on Steam to make your app run on Steam. You really don't. A user can add any executable to the Steam Library via the "Add a Game -> Add Non-Steam Game" button in the bottom-left corner of the GUI. It works 100% locally and with any kind of executable (not just games). It also bypasses any auto-updates. Finally, you can launch an app like that from the CLI or a desktop shortcut without opening Steam (well, it'll still run and update itself when needed, but you bypass the GUI).

The full discussion about this I had with ChatGPT is here: https://klibert.pl/statics/Steam-Linux-Runtime-Stack-2026-08...

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> A user can add any executable to the Steam Library via the "Add a Game -> Add Non-Steam Game" button in the bottom-left corner of the GUI.

Yeah, but that's also not exactly a better user-experience for the end-user than "Download .exe, double-click to launch" or "Download .msi, finish install, run program".

Distribute your software however you want, I tend to try to make the download and install as familiar as possible to the users of the specific platforms.

Btw, even your starting prompt is guiding the model to just agree with your opening statement. You can't just roll with whatever the model says and assume the conclusion of "definitely can run in 10 years unchanged" is true.

Yeah, that's why the second prompt starts with "You misunderstood" and a correction. This is a long conversation, with multiple experiments performed and a lot of inspection of all the intermediate results on my end between prompts. You assuming otherwise without reading is a bit offensive.

To your point on installation: sure, but if you value it that much, just pay Valve to add you to the Steam store? And that would be the only possible solution given my constraints, all explicitly mentioned at least once in the linked conversation:

   - binary produced today works
   - without changes
   - on both Linux and Windows
   - is a GUI app
   - has some dependencies
   - is developed on Linux (no Windows needed)

For this set of constrains, Proton/Wine with a cross-compiled Win32 binary/bundle is literally the only solution (care to name another?)

For other constraints, it's a solution. Worth considering. That's all.

> You assuming otherwise without reading is a bit offensive.

Yeah sorry, hurling huge LLM conversations at me tends to make me skim them, hope you don't mind I didn't study the conversation you had with ChatGPT in detail.

That you considered someone skimming a chat log offensive yet the act of sharing those chat logs and expecting others to dredge through them, is almost offensive to me. So I guess we can call it even now.

> For this set of constrains, Proton/Wine with a cross-compiled Win32 binary/bundle is literally the only solution (care to name another?)

Cross-compiling the good old way, with a Linux VM, Windows VM and a macOS host (maybe Mac Mini?). I basically have the very same requirements (+ macOS), except zero third party dependencies, and end up doing it this way, all managed with Nix so basically all the installation-bloatyness is something I deal with so users get the exact same experience they expect on their OS.

> I'm saying you don't need to publish on Steam to make your app run on Steam.

The context was how to distribute software to Linux users. Not how Linux users could run Windows software.

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