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.
Nah, it’s repeating the installation process until you finally get enough stuff working to have internet, and then you can bootstrap installing every other bit of software that you need. Thank goodness for rolling release - I can’t imagine having to go through that again.
You can install Arch directly from a UEFI shell over the Internet: https://archlinux.org/releng/netboot/
If your BIOS has a UEFI shell that supports DHCP, HTTP and IPv4 PXE you can load the ipxe-arch.efi over HTTP and start installing.
I haven’t done a vanilla arch install for years either, because if that sort of thing is fun for some folks great, but it was only fun once or twice for me. I think a lot of the vanilla arch faithful end up scripting it for fresh installs.
But, FWIW there’s always endeavouros, manjaro, and I’m sure other Arch derivatives I’ve forgotten about. I just did an endeavouros install on new hardware I was given last weekend, and it’s certainly no harder to install than Ubuntu.