I hate STEAM, and I'd use Impulse if it had more games and more sales.
The only good thing about STEAM is the integrated friends list and the frequent sales; otherwise Impulse is better because you don't have to run the stupid thing when playing a game.
STEAM's stuffty software is a resource hog - I can play MWLL (Crysis x2 p. much) on high and yet my PC hiccups when loading up the main STEAM window. If I play a Source game like Garry's mod then close it, hl2.exe and gameoverlay.exe continue to run in the background, preventing me from running another game and preventing me from opening STEAM windows. If I close them via task manager, I have to restart STEAM to play another game, because otherwise it pukes up a "STEAM STARTUP ERROR". The ingame browser constantly crashes when loading random webpages, and when it crashes it prevents you from even opening the overlay to talk to friends, meaning you're pretty much boned when playing a long game unless your games are alt-tab friendly. The overlay sometimes restarts itself but rarely.
STEAM community goes down at random with no warnings except in the cesspool of the STEAM public forums, and it went down for several months straight back in the day.
