Why Steam on Linux matters for non-gamers

Why Steam on Linux matters for non-gamers

"It's useful and I'm willing to do the work" is justification enough.

You forgot to mention that it must be free which automatically excludes most of the software available. And “I'm willing to do the work” means not “I'm ready to read the guidelines and make a package in accordance to them”, but rather “I'm ready do change my package when guidelines are changing”. Not even Apple (which offers access to the most lucrative market over there) does that! It may refuse to allow newer version in the store if you don't upgrade it in accordance to the updated guidelines and it may remove it if it'll find out that you actually violated third-party license or something like this, but in general: what was added to AppStore once will be available there years later.

There is nothing wrong with trying to push FOSS, but this goal is fundamentally incompatible with the goal of having sizable presence on the desktop.

You could always contact RPMfusion maintainers, of course, but it's not part of the Fedora and there are large wishlist already which includes such pearls as Packages [which] already exist for RPM Fusion Russia and Chromium which violates Fedora's policies of handling libraries and various other issues.

Also, at least in Fedora, it's the maintainer who decides in which version the new package will appear.

I know. But Fedora is rare exception: most other distributions only upgrade packages in exceptional circumstances even if maintainer wishes otherwise.

It's just that many choose to only ship it for the current and future versions.

Which, frankly, makes absolutely no sense from user's POV. Currently used distribution model basically asks "do you want to change your wardrobe, your car and your house once per month or once per five years". Which is ridiculous: I want to change my wardrobe when it goes out of fashion but I only change my house once per few years (some people never change their house). The offer to completely redecorate my house just to get a new tie sounds crazy, but somehow the offer to break my [perfectly working and tuned up] desktop environment just to get GEGL-based GIMP is normal? Gosh.

Frankly I don't know what "problem" distributions are solving in their current form. Disk space savings? Come on: my phone has 32 GB of flash and my desktop has terabyte (wel, four, actually, but who's counting?)! Why not install all the essential components from the start and allow me to pick and choose the rest? Ah, security… but why security is affected to such a degree by just installing features I'll not use??? All these "numerous dependencies" are mostly shared libraries which represent just random set of bytes as long as they are stored on my system, but not actually used by programs.