this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 115 points 10 months ago (75 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 10 months ago (4 children)

I didnt want to hate snap either, until I found out its proprietary technology… on a foss OS… since then I‘m pretty over it - and ubuntu for that matter. I‘ll probably switch to debian once ubuntu 23.10 runs out of support.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

Well... Flatpak ships Propietary Software too. And at this point Propietary Software is almost avoidable (unless you have a LibreBoot. I want one too). But it's reasonable to be frustrated that an operating system as influential as Ubuntu has ended up falling so down in its technology, and that it has the support of a company like Chanonical.

Edit: Thank you for the comments. I didn't noticed Snap itself is propietary.

[–] arthur 3 points 10 months ago

I think they meant that the Snap itself (or part of it) is proprietary. But I'm not sure.

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