A lot of people seem to be misunderstanding OP’s question and just suggesting places that offer free games.

OP is asking if there’s any not shady way to get a game that’s offered for free on Steam without DRM other than using the Steam client.

If the game is only available through Steam then unfortunately the answer is no. Depending on the nature of your objection to the Steam client there are some possible courses of action other than going somewhere sketchy though.

You could install it, download the game, copy it from the Steam install location, then uninstall Steam.

Alternatively keep a sandboxed Steam client installed in a VM to download the game which you extract from the VM.

Another option might be to just ask someone you know that does use Steam to download the game and send it to you.

No disagreement at all there.

Falling back to insults when you can’t provide a source isn’t terribly convincing.

I can at least provide examples of them stating directly the opposite.

I use Adobe Premiere for editing, and one of the many fun ways that Adobe is kind of ass is that it just doesn’t work on Linux.

• Luke, “My Linux Curse is NOT Over… But It’s Getting BETTER - Pt.2 Linux 30 Day Challenge 2026”, emphasis mine

Adobe is very clearly the party being blamed here, not linux.

Also:

The Proton compatibility layer has made incredible progress. Even actually during our last couple of months, it’s improved a lot. But it can’t do anything about developers who block their games on Linux.

From “I Can’t Go Back To Windows”, again emphasis mine. Again very clearly laying the blame at the developers of the incompatible software.

Presumably you can point me to a specific video, since you seem so completely sure of it. I’m not scrubbing through potentially hours of footage to try to find something that I don’t think exists.

As for your suggestion that he just reviews what he’s paid to do, sure, that seems plausible. I’m not trying to argue that it’s an impartial channel and people should be watching him. You certainly don’t need to defend a decision to not watch it.

If a user needs Photoshop in their workflow then Linux isn’t an option for them. That is a problem with Linux, from a user perspective.

Who’s at fault for that problem is a different question, and I’d be surprised if LTT ever say that Linux is to blame.