> I'm not 100% sure why they have a "repo" for an "installer". It sort of rather defeats the purpose.
It's because they don't really grasp yet how these things work on Linux. Which is understandable, since they're coming from a Windows world, where package management has to be done manually. So the Steam executable you download is an installer that downloads/installs the Steam package manager, which then downloads/maintains the games.
Ideally, all the Steam Linux games would be maintained in APT repositories and you would update them through APT, but I don't know if that will ever happen. At least this is better than nothing at all.
It's because they don't really grasp yet how these things work on Linux. Which is understandable, since they're coming from a Windows world, where package management has to be done manually. So the Steam executable you download is an installer that downloads/installs the Steam package manager, which then downloads/maintains the games.
Ideally, all the Steam Linux games would be maintained in APT repositories and you would update them through APT, but I don't know if that will ever happen. At least this is better than nothing at all.