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.
Who the fuck was asking for a Steam Snap.
JFC
Give up on snaps. It’s not gonna happen. Whatever benefits they claim they could provide could be merged into Flatpak and everyone wins.
It’s Canonical. They’ll perfect snaps in 8 years, then give it up
Snap is what finally got me to drop Ubuntu for Debian. Such a pain.
Already gave up. Switched to Debian and it’s been great. I loved Ubuntu, but fuck snap all the bullshit that comes with it.
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.
Counterpoint: Snaps work fine for me, really convenient. But flatpak always shits the bed on my internet, it also needs huge Nvidia driver packages of it’s own if you have an Nvidia GPU (my laptop has one)
Snap on the other hand is very much fire and forget