A bigger issue is that the Steam Deck touchpads don't work without Steam being open

This is interesting, because the touchpads on the Steam Controller do work without Steam being open, at least on Linux, though without cursor acceleration. I wonder why the touchpads on the Deck were handled differently.

Meanwhile I play all my GOG games on my SteamDeck. Sure it runs SteamOS and Steam in a sort of Big Picture Mode, but it's still just a Linux PC, you're free to use whatever software on there in Desktop mode, and then you can add all the apps and games you want to the Steam launcher, and run them that way. You're not forced to stay in Steam, nor are you forced to only buy games from Steam. You can exit Steam on the Desktop mode and still use Proton to play Windows games, but that leaves you with more overhead running than when you do it from Steam in the big picture mode.

The steam deck touchpad thing is because it needs the steam input drivers and software.

Realistically if valve decoupled the steam input driver and software from the steam client then you could use it with out the client.

But that's like bitching you can't use a video card with out a driver... It's kind of a well duh

Even then so long as there's some level of touchpad support you should still have basically functionality so long as there detected which the deck has.

Absolutely agree, everyone, institutions or individuals, have flaws. I was just pointing out that Valva is not comparable to most, if not all, the big names in gaming in terms of following a more customer-centric culture.

It stands to reason that they want their DRM to be used, otherwise, why even design it, right? The 'forcing' part on many factors that Epic and most others resort to is what really grinds my gears.