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Not really a user-friendliness issue, but pet peeve about one thing that I can't patch because it's not open source. Steam doesn't let me cap the number of concurrent TCP connections when downloading updates. Like, TCP degrades reasonably gracefully under contention; each connection gets something like an equal amount of bandwidth. But with Steam downloads -- which are bulk, noninteractive, and which I definitely don't want to take priority for available bandwidth -- the package uses a ton of connections. If you have 30 connections, it gets ~97% of the available bandwidth when contending with a more-conventional protocol that uses a single connection. The Steam downloader logic, as I understand from past reading, keeps adding more until it doesn't see any significant degree of increase in speed, which is exactly what I don't want to have it doing. And Valve doesn't provide any way to turn this off.
Steam does provide some other mechanisms to try to limit its bandwidth usage, but none are very satisfactory.
You can hard-limit the rate of downloads. But I don't want that -- if there's no contention for bandwidth, I want Steam to use it. I just want it to back off when there is contention.
You can limit the time of downloads. But I don't always know when there's going to be demand for bandwidth.
You can limit downloads to not run when playing games. That addresses the very specific case of downloads interfering with Steam games that have latency-sensitive demands, like multiplayer FPSes. But that's far from the only situation where there's something contending for bandwidth.
I mostly use open-source software, so it's really frustrating when I run into behavior in proprietary software that I can't reasonably fix. Plus, usually if it bothers me, it's bothered someone else in the past, and they've gone and fixed it, so I don't even need to do so.