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.
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.
Who else has opinions on snaps vs. flatpacks? Are they distinct to the “Linux professional” somehow?
Id say most Linux hobbyists are “somewhat professional” at least, to get competent in Linux you need to Git Gud. But if you are interested:
There is this (a kind of overarching, slightly long overview) and the people they talked to are professionals.
https://thenewstack.io/canonicals-snap-great-good-bad-ugly/
And this, a more details specifics side-by-side (for example sandboxing for each type of package):
Note as an example: All three can sandbox, only flatpak it is mandatory, but snaps and flatpak its on by default. appimage is not, it needs to be enabled. Some smaller points such as this may be glossed over (that I noticed).
https://phoenixnap.com/kb/flatpak-vs-snap-vs-appimage
Yes? How is this a question?