Timothée Besset, a software engineer who works on the Steam client for Valve, took to Mastodon this week to reveal: “Valve is seeing an increasing number of bug reports for issues caused by Canonical’s repackaging of the Steam client through snap”.
“We are not involved with the snap repackaging. It has a lot of issues”, Besset adds, noting that “the best way to install Steam on Debian and derivative operating systems is to […] use the official .deb”.
Those who don’t want to use the official Deb package are instead asked to ‘consider the Flatpak version’ — though like Canonical’s Steam snap the Steam Flatpak is also unofficial, and no directly supported by Valve.
I don’t even want to hate on Snap, I just think Flatpak is probably superior in almost every way and it’s probably not great that there are three competing formats for “applications with dependencies included”. It was supposed to be “package your app to this format, dear developer, so everyone can use it no matter the distro they use”, now it’s a bit more complicated. Frustrating, as this means developers without that many resources will only offer some formats and whichever you (or your distro) prefers might not be available.
I know that you can get every format to work on every distro (AppImages are just single binaries you can execute), but each has their own first class citizen.
By the way, the unofficial Steam Flatpak has been working well for me under Fedora 39 KDE Spin, but an official one would be great to have.
Just tell the billion dollar company to allow people to download the games on their browser. The Client only exists as a means to DRM and analytics, there’s no actual reason for games not to become standalone.
That’s pretty unfair. Before Valve’s efforts, the first thing we PC gamers asked eachother about a new game was always “could you get it running?”
Three bad old days were quite bad, and they started getting better in lock step with Valve’s improvements to Steam.
Correlation/causation and all that. But for a lot of us Valve earned a lot of goodwill simply by allowing “request a refund” on games that run poorly. (Edit: which was apparently forced on Valve by a government. Valve got lucky there!)
I’m sure Canonical’s neverending death march towards Snap, along with the OS running outdated packages, is why Valve no longer uses Ubuntu for SteamOS development. The greatest April Fools was Ubuntu dropping Snaps because so many people were saying how they could go back to using Ubuntu again…then they noticed it was a joke and the sadness set in.
Tbh i never found an app that runs better on snap than on deb
Same goes for almost anything like snap
Canonical’s SteamSnap is Causing Headachesfor ValveWho the fuck was asking for a Steam Snap.
JFC
Give up on snaps. It’s not gonna happen. Whatever benefits they claim they could provide could be merged into Flatpak and everyone wins.
Flatpak is not designed to solve all the same problems as snap they have very different scopes and goals. It’s really only Linux hobbyists that see these as comparable technologies.
Also the Steam flatpak is unofficial just like the snap, they would be unwilling to support flatpak issues as well.
Linux hobbyists
Who else has opinions on snaps vs. flatpacks? Are they distinct to the “Linux professional” somehow?
Yes? How is this a question?
I’m really hoping this all forces Ubuntu out as the face of desktop Linux.
It’s been pretty low tier for years now, and Canonical just proves corporate backing doesn’t guarantee a good distro.
Snap is pretty garbage, default GNOME is horrendous, the repos break every other month, apt is still pretty lame despite being an user upgrade for apt-get, the packages are neither stable nor cutting edge, they change core OS backends like every update which breaks configs and makes documentation obsolete.
I’d like to suggest Fedora as the new goto, but I feel like it’s a bit too privacy and FOSS oriented which may scare away new users.
Debian is great but it doesn’t have latest packages which isn’t optimal as performance upgrades would take time to release or need to be manually installed.
unfortunately, industry loves shit like Ubuntu and RHEL because of their corporate backing. comps love having the insurance of someone to blame or somebody to fix their shit when things hit the fan. I’ve worked for many comps who choose RHEL for that alone. Should we choose the OS built by a bunch of randos in their basement, or something backed by Red Hat where I can just pay them money to handle my support tickets faster if shit blows up? or who tf do I have my cyber liabilities insurance guys sue if the OS has a huge fuckin problem? I want a company behind that shit.
Would be cool if they just straight up supported flatpaks. That’s been my main way of gaming for a couple years now, and it works great. The downside is that the folder structure is confusing so it makes things like modding pretty difficult.
or, you know, you can use your distro packages
Steam’s runtime is already sandbox-ception. Flatpak might be more appealing to Valve than it seems.
I see no value in switching from current situation (in-repo deb pkg + steam autoupdates) to flat/snap/farts, which I don’t use at all…
It’s not about you, it’s about what’s easier for Valve. If Valve is fine packaging, and getting bug reports, from all the different distributions, they’ll keep doing things as is. But as a Linux app developer myself, I exclusively publish to Flatpak because it guarantees everyone has the same system.
you’re at best uninformed about how the process actually works and what’s the role of a distro maintainer, a distro project, upstream authors. Not that every piece of software has enough value to be included in this process so maybe it will make sense to package your stuff by yourself.
or, you know, you could use a much better and consistent platform
I use debian, I’m happy and definitely have no idea what you are talking about :)
Debian is one of the distros where flatpaks are most appropriate lol, it’s the best way to not have programs that are really old
Adding weird third party repositories that can cause all kinds of issues probably isn’t the best idea
tbf, flatpaks are problematic shit noobs tend to appreciate because reasons. That said, beside the fact steam ships its own chroot, I’m a happy sid user and I don’t even have this imaginary problem of things being ‘very old’ sooo … but I can confirm you shouldn’t add weird third party repos or shitty flatpaks :)
It’s not just noobs that appreciate flatpak. Flatpak is good all-round.
And the problem of Debian packages being old is very much not imaginary lol. Debian has only just moved beyond Gnome 3.38/Plasma 5.20/kernel version 5.10.
That’s ancient. And that’s not to mention the other software repos, which are often updated at an even slower pace.
Don’t assume that just because you want extremely outdated packages, everyone else must want the same.
