Canonical's Steam Snap is Causing Headaches for Valve - OMG! Ubuntu
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Canonical may be ramping up its efforts to improve the Ubuntu gaming experience — yasss — but it seems their Steam snap package is causing a few headaches

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.

  • Ephera
    5•11 months ago

    Because many apps will (or would prefer to) only be bundled as Flatpak. I agree that the deduplication is not a trivial problem to solve, even if they might have already solved it for DEBs (I don’t know).

    But your entire comment could just as well be a rant why Canonical shouldn’t have introduced Snaps in the first place. It might be good for their bank account, if they can somehow monetize part of the cake, but splitting the cake even further, after it’s already split into DEB, RPM, AppImage, Flatpak, Docker, APK etc., that’s maximum user confusion.

    • bjorney
      2•11 months ago

      Because many apps will (or would prefer to) only be bundled as Flatpak.

      This reads like speculation to me and is directly contrary to the file counts on flathub and snapcraft. What about CLI apps and server software? How are they supposed to distribute their software if not via snap? (Flatpak doesn’t support this well)

      could just as well be a rant why Canonical shouldn’t have introduced Snaps in the first place

      You are acting like Ubuntu core (and snaps) came after flatpak? Snaps were announced almost a decade ago

      Like, I get you don’t like snaps, but your argument is basically “every Linux distribution should ship the same default software, and it should be the software I choose”

      • Ephera
        2•11 months ago

        I don’t know why you’re trying to interpret all kinds of things into my comment. I did not say any of that. This isn’t some competition to show who’s technically more correct.