What you download is just a stub, when then pulls down the rest of the components required to run Steam. It's the same thing with their Linux installer.
Honestly the frequency with which companies are only offering stub installers bothers me. My company has an office in a country with terrible internet, and since Microsoft no longer offers an offline installer for Office (unless you have a volume license key, which we're too small to have), it's absolute hell to have our employees download and install office on their computers when they join the company.
> Honestly the frequency with which companies are only offering stub installers bothers me.
In general, I heartily agree with you. However, because Steam's primary purpose is to download and install huge gobs of data from Valve's servers, I feel that Valve's decision to ship just a stub installer is totally justified.
MSFT's stub Office installer, or Google's stub Chrome installer? Inexcusable.
Edit: Ugh. I should caffeinate. Steam's primary purpose is to let you play video games. However, the way it does that is by downloading gobs of data & etc.
Honestly the frequency with which companies are only offering stub installers bothers me. My company has an office in a country with terrible internet, and since Microsoft no longer offers an offline installer for Office (unless you have a volume license key, which we're too small to have), it's absolute hell to have our employees download and install office on their computers when they join the company.