Steam *does* get slower when you have a lot of games. But then so does Desura. ....

It loads longer than Photoshop CS5 and is over 1Gb HDD space. Lightweight anvil.

Also, I remember that Torchlight had (still has?) a problem of excessive disk activity related to some folders connected to cloud/savegames... there should be a topic somewhere in the old Steam forums; one suggestion that i applied succesfully was to put an exception in the antivirus software to that specific folder.

Bloated meaning the amount of features they have crammed into the same old years-old client design.

My photoshop takes longer to load, and if you take away user data and games, the Steam folder is about 500Mb (quite a lot of it is different servers and graphics....). Lots of it is not needed, granted, but I tend to have more than that space free.

It has improved over the years. Can it still be better? Yes off course it could, but I think it is slowly getting there, and (in my opinion) not as Crosmody states - that it is getting worse.

It is more lightweight than it was before. Does not mean it can not be better.
And you can turn most of them off if you want (except CEG...). The client takes less resources now than before :)

I just think your statement before is not quite correct, there has been improvements, and it is slowly (very slowly) improving. Well, that is what I have seen on my system, at least.

The design is cluttered, stuff like Discussions, Community, the greenlight section, library, the store itself, all of it takes up real estate on the client. For a company rolling in distribution money they sure have managed to create an ugly front-page setup for the store.

If you're not interested in that you could default Steam to load the library on startup.

Maybe, and I only use about 10% of Steam's functionality, but I still find it more functional than gog's forum, account and store design and implementation :)

Again, not saying it can not or should not be improved, it should, but it is slowly getting better.

I'm not talking about my personal experience, I use it in offline mode when I do use it. I'm just pointing out that Valve ought to really use some of that dosh to hire some competent web designers and programmers to build a new client, because current one is ugly and bloated. It was reasonably designed for 2005 tho

That's what I do. Straight to my games, and none of the other things.

Does anyone use "Big picture" as I just had a look at that and my laptop grinds to a halt.

that's meant for hooking a PC to a big screen using a Pad and effectively turning it into a console.

edit - No, I don't use it

I don't use Big Picture, tried it once and never again. It was like riding a snail.

Keyword there "laptop". It isn't designed for laptops. It is designed for people with home pc's who use it as an entertainment system. Plug in a controller, put on big picture mode and all is good between you and your tv. It works fine on my desktop.