^Manu

I think you know that your first point is not interesting. It's obviously possible to have a really great launcher front-end on Windows PC's, we just don't have one. Valve are not a good example of releasing a great product, they can't even make Steam's core experience not-suck. There's still DPI issues in 4k all through the UI. Money isn't it, 'underlying PC architecture' has nothing to do with it, they just don't care; they're rich as hell anyway, and they all roll around their offices each day working on fun hobby projects that usually go nowhere (really, that's what they do). Many launchers have a big-screen style mode which can be controlled with a controller, this is not an OS thing, it's just a front-end thing. What you're saying doesn't address my point at all; I said that a user profile system would add a key missing piece, and that's clearly possible. It's not even particularly hard, it's a well-understood piece of tech and UI. There's no innovation there. It's just work to be done, and I'll stop here, but I was just trying to make a case that I think it would be valuable work to do, and really close the gap on offering a seamless experience. If there's a profile system at the core, and there is a plugin architecture (with access to some profile APIs); then users may be able to contribute things like steam-user switching and stuff.

That's not even a remotely satisfying solution. Here's the expected flow: press power button, computer boots directly into front-end which is operable with a gamepad. User powers on the gamepad, chooses their profile and gets on with it. If you micromanage an install of launchbox (or might as well just juggle steam installs at this stage), then you need a mouse and/or keyboard nearby. It's possibly easier to micromanage windows user accounts; click start logout, switch user, etc. Once you reach this place where you see the windows desktop, and a mouse/keyboard are in the room, then we have failed. This is no longer a gaming device, it's a PC, and what it *really* wants to do is boot up excel. The PC desperately needs a user-experience that's competitive with games consoles, and god knows Steam is not up to the task; its multi-user is broken, you must find a phone, open lastpass, type long passwords, and do 2FA auth whenever we want to switch users. If you could approach the console experience on a PC, you would win the market. I think you're close, and user profiles is the only major missing element.

There's nothing incompatible with businesses and open-source. Taking advantage of free labor is an excellent business strategy in my books! We made money from Stepmania way back in the day. Is the plugin architecture capable of inserting foundational features like that?

It's not like that now. Even for emulated old games, modern emulators extract scores and log them on leaderboards and all the modern stuff. Profiles feel like a very natural (necessary perhaps) part of that. Anyway, I've made my case, it seems there's nothing more I can do. Is the code available? Can we contribute?

I mean, in addition to my primary issue in my OP (launching Steam games), I also want scores and saves and save states, and all that good stuff bound to my profile.

I'm surprised people don't see the value in this. Imagine if you tried to take the user profiles away from any games console... it'd be a non-starter. It's the same here. I share a computer with multiple people; how can I possibly do without a user profile system? I can't possibly be alone on this.

Incidentally, I see nothing about multi-user support or user profiles at all in the current poll, so we can't actually vote for this

Fair enough. Well aside from that, I'm still interested in thinking about how a great solution to this problem might look. A user system that feels like modern consoles would be great.

Well, that sounds nice... But developers also like to (and deserve to) make some living I could take a contract from TechSoft to do something mind-numbing, or work on my hobby project. I must pay my rent... which one should I choose?

I wonder if we could login with user A a launch steam for that user. Then runas another instance of steam for the user B. Then when you runas a game for either user, it may the steam instance already active and ready to go, and just get on with launching he game? It does seem possible to have 2 steam instances running; if you login with A, run steam, then switch user to B, and run steam, both users will have a steam instance. So we just want to fiddle that arrangement so both instances are accessible from one windows session... I think there might be a path.

Well my question is probably better directed directly at Jason in that case

What magnitude bounty would make it worthwhile to the dev team to reconsider?

Shame. How come? Undesirable feature? I would gladly buy something like LaunchBox for hundreds of dollars if it had just that one feature.

It's unreasonably inconvenient to logout and then login with a different windows user on a machine with no mouse...

One thought is; we each have a windows login, and Steam configured for each of our windows accounts. I feel like we should be able to launch games as our respective windows user, and have the appropriate Steam account apply to the session. You can launch apps with a select user account using `runas /user:UserName cmd...`