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.

  • cum@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    262·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
      9·
      11 months ago

      Maybe they’ll get there eventually, considering this is their method of choice for installing 3rd party apps on SteamOS 3.0.

      • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
        71·
        11 months ago

        Steam’s runtime is already sandbox-ception. Flatpak might be more appealing to Valve than it seems.

        • superbirra@lemmy.world
          11·
          11 months ago

          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…

          • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
            41·
            11 months ago

            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.

            • superbirra@lemmy.world
              21·
              11 months ago

              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.

      • cum@lemmy.cafeEnglish
        43·
        11 months ago

        or, you know, you could use a much better and consistent platform

        • Falcon@lemmy.world
          2·
          11 months ago

          Well, no, neither approach is better than the other, it’s apples and oranges.

          There will always be a place for installing native applications. In the least analysis, the container itself should probably have some dependencies packaged for the target program.

          The benefits of containerisation are obvious, but it’s been a lot of work and there are still edge cases to iron out.

          FreeBSD has had jails since 2000. Linux, however, only got namespaces in 2008 and the first bubblewrap release on GitHub was 2016.

          I’ve been using chroots and containers for development for about 2 years now and it’s been fantastic, however, I’m still grateful I don’t have to jump inside one every time I need to write a python script.

          • barsoap@lemm.ee
            1·
            11 months ago

            I’m still grateful I don’t have to jump inside one every time I need to write a python script.

            Honestly, I’m on NixOS and it’s not a bother because it saves time down the line when your script would break during a system upgrade which it doesn’t on NixOS as without you telling it to, it will still use all the old dependencies. Also you already have a couple of flake.nix floating around you can just copy and adjust and direnv does the rest.

          • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
            31·
            11 months ago

            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

            • superbirra@lemmy.world
              23·
              11 months ago

              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 :)

              • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
                12·
                11 months ago

                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.

                • stinerman [Ohio]@midwest.socialEnglish
                  1·
                  11 months ago

                  I don’t mind the old packages (I’m typing from Debian Stable right now). If that’s a bother for other people Debian Stable isn’t the way to go. Even I wouldn’t recommend Stable on a desktop/laptop unless that person knew what they were getting themselves into. I used to run Sid a while back, but didn’t want to have to deal with the mild breakage from time to time. Generally speaking it’s “stable enough” for most people, especially on a daily driver.

                  That being said, I have a few flatpaks running, but that’s mostly because they’re apps that aren’t packaged for Debian.

                  • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
                    1·
                    11 months ago

                    Yeah. And if it works for you, it’s good. I have a headless Debian home server running in my house right now.

                    I’m just saying it’s completely valid to not be into Debian because the packages are ancient, just as it’s also completely valid to not be into Arch because the packages are too bleeding edge.

                • superbirra@lemmy.world
                  12·
                  11 months ago

                  you normally skip reading half of the comments you reply to, eh? :) ciao ciao from my debian system which does everything, including paying my rent and a bit more, w/o this shit ;)

                  • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
                    21·
                    11 months ago

                    I didn’t ignore anything.

                    And you don’t need to be so defensive. Nobody said Debian is bad or that you can’t use it to make money, just that it being severely outdated can be an issue, and it can. Flatpak helps, but it doesn’t completely fix it.

                    My comment wasn’t meant to hurt your feelings.