I agree in principle it would be great, aligning steam more with the general behaviour expected of linux software...

...but on the other hand, Steam self-updating is essential to ensuring everyone is at the same (latest) version always, regardless of distro.

Distro official repos are tipically managed by distro devs that fetch code from package devs, inspect it, compile it for the target distro/version and do a couple tests to ensure it works, then a version of the package gets pushed to the repos.

Ubuntu could be targeted by Valve via a PPA, but it is non-trivial to develop and maintain private repos similar to PPAs for every other known distro.

So while Valve officially supports only Ubuntu and their own SteamOS (Debian + tweaks), the current way they push updates results in a small workload for distro devs of all other distros (prepare an essentially immutable package that sets up Steam auto-install/auto-update functionality and let it do the rest) while also not putting a heavier load on Valve to keep all these repos running.


Another issue is that normally distros handle package updates via sudo/root priviledges, while Steam auto-updates can be applied ASAP by any user even without admin priviledges.


All that being said, I'd very much love if Valve stops advertising that .deb file as the official way to initially install Steam to any distro, as it is a source of *very* frequent issues for noobs coming from Windows, that are used to installing things by fetching an installer exe from the app developer instead of prioritizing installment via the OS's official repos.

The deb fails frequently to honor dependancies and etc even on Ubuntu, and the basic install package for steam is near universally present in distro repos already, so giving very basic install instructions for each distro is a lot simpler to do and a one-time-job (as the instructions won't change significantly over time) while eliminating a lot of noob initial frustration.