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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Canonical's Steam Snap is Causing Headaches for Valve (www.omgubuntu.co.uk)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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] 7 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Okay...

What's a Steam Snap? I don't know what that is

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Snap is a sandboxed environment to install applications in.

Flatpak is a more portable implementation of the same broad idea, it downloads a chroot and runs applications from within using a separate program called bubblewrap (one could, in theory, use chroot to run apps from within the downloaded flatpak images, bubblewrap offers further isolation through things like namespaces and cgroups etc. )

Snap, unlike flatpak, is a Canonical specific implementation that has a reputation for breaking a lot of things.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It's perfectly possible to isolate a steam install, NixOS does that by default to even get it running (on NixOS nothing is where any binary blob expects it to be). There was a very brief issue with experimental steam when they tightened up their own sandboxing and doing sandbox-in-sandbox broke stuff but that was fixed before release as Valve is, indeed, responsive, even if the distribution isn't officially supported. But you gotta have some professionalism and have institutional continuity, they don't want to deal with J. Random Hacker doing a one-off packaging job. Or distros trying to be smart and replace the steam runtime with their own library versions. Basically, assume that the whole thing runs directly on the kernel, make sure to have graphics drivers, and you'll be fine running it as-is.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Snaps are a relatively recent way of packaging application installations in certain flavors of Linux. Steam is Valve's game distribution platform (amongst other things).

There's an unofficial Snap package to install Steam and it apparently doesn't work so good

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

It's also worth mentioning that the snap system is quite disliked by a lot of users for various reasons, like stuff not working right.

I suppose this article is a good example of snaps not working right.