[drivebyacct2]

> if you have a cluster of games/etc managed by steam in your home directory that is already not under the control of package management, what do you gain by splitting out the steam client itself?

The same thing you gain from every other linux package that has a globally installed application with per-user configuration? which is... every single other application in the entire linux world?

>Steam has always been designed on both osx and windows to be a portable folder that you can move around from system to system and run stuff out of wihout worrying about installers and dependancies.

Huh? Are you familiar with Linux? You can move/copy your home dir, reinstall the package-managed binary and it "just works". That is the best definition of portable, far better than copy-pasting a "Program Files" directory between machines and crossing your fingers. Again, I've yet to hear a technical reason that we can't have /usr/bin/steam and ~/.steam/<steamapps> like every other Linux application does.