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.
The problem is that 3rd parties are doing the packaging both on Snap and Flatpak whereas if they had followed proper security practice ONLY THE REAL DEV should ever be allowed to package their app as a Flatpak or Snap.
This would ensure security, as well as a proper functioning flatpak/snap and also all feedback would be directed to the Dev.
I’ve never liked the fact that Canonical and whoever can make Snaps and Flatpaks of other people’s software. There is zero security guarantee, zero guarantee they’ll update it and zero guarantee it will work.
Just because Snap and Flatpak exist doesn’t mean just anyone should be able to just make them.
If Valve only chooses to make a deb then so be it! It’s their product!
Wait until you find out how distro packaging works
Says who? If it were the case, Linux would either be a nightmare of fragmentation or become centralised on one distribution. Distros need to be able to package their own software, and these are kind of like distributions. Also since we’re talking about proprietary software here, is it really any better security practice if the “real dev” packages it or somebody else, they both could contain malicious code.
Valve are not going to put malicious code on their app. Neither is VLC or any other FOSS developer.
The distros should stick to packaging their repo apps and leave the Snap/FlatPak tech as an alternative to the original dev if they decide they want to use that.
We can’t have Bob from nowhere packaging Valve, then not updating it or patching it because he doesn’t have time. Or 5 Bob’s all doing the same thing with 5 copies of Valve on the Store.
It’s crazy. This is what causes fragmentation. Flathub should vet every app and if you are not the dev of the app, you may not host it on Flathub. You’re still welcome to make a Flatpak for home use on your own pc but not for wide distribution.
How would you know that? It’s not like it’s something that doesn’t happen.
I don’t know what snaps are like but that’s clearly a non-existent problem on Flathub.
I don’t know why you feel like there’s permission involved. You don’t have to use Flathub, therefore Flathub can have what ever policies it likes. Users can set up a different flatpak repo if there’s a need.
That’s not my point. I use Flathub but I try to only use verified apps which were packaged by the actual dev.
I’d rather get a deb from the official dev than a flatpak from flathub packaged by someone who is essentially anonymous and could easily inject malicious code.
If you think the dev himself could inject malicious code in the official app, then you should be super aware that an anonymous Joe can too, and is far more likely to.
Anyway flatpak ideally was supposed to save Devs the work of packaging for every distro so it makes sense that the real actual verified dev of the app would package the flatpak/snap himself
isn’t that kind of what AUR is, and exactly what people love about arch ?
Yes but if you use an Arch distro like Endeavour, they won’t support you with issues caused by AUR apps. Because of these reasons I mentioned.
How is “the dev of the app” defined, exaxtly?
The official Developer of the app. E.g. the official dev of Blender is blender.org. The flatpak people give them a line of code to embed in their website and they use that to verify that the dev really is blender.org and not a malicious actor.
Ah, that makes sense. Inwas hung up on the word, interpreting it as a single guy, not an entity. Thank you.
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How so? How does ensuring they only the real dev of the app is also the only one allowed to package it hurt desktop adoption.
It’s very easy to enforce. Flathub need to verify the identity of the person submitting the Flatpak to make sure it’s the app’s dev uploading it and not Joe Smith or nsa.gov…
For security reasons the packaging of flatpaks in flathub is done by flathub, whether they are devs or third parties they just write the manifest. Although I seem to remember there are some exceptions, such as firefox.
Ah, I was not aware of that. Ok, that’s good to hear because it potentially adds a layer of security.
Any idea whether they vet the code as well?
Not that I know of. But you may be interested that it requires prior authorization to modify manifests.
Excellent. Thank you