Canonical's Steam Snap is Causing Headaches for Valve - OMG! Ubuntu
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Canonical may be ramping up its efforts to improve the Ubuntu gaming experience — yasss — but it seems their Steam snap package is causing a few headaches

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.

  • QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world
    1·
    10 months ago

    Why do people hate snap over flatpak? I feel like I’ve read a thread or two about it, but I haven’t seen an answer that was particularly satisfying (almost definitely for a lack of trying on my part, to be clear).

    • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
      22·
      10 months ago

      • Proprietary on the server/distribution end

      • Controlled 100% by Canonical

      • Worse performance, particularly in terms of app startup times

      • Snaps are mounted as separate filesystems, so it can make things look cluttered in your file explorer or when you’re listing stuff with lsblk

      • Canonical often forces users to use Snaps even when users have explicitly tried to install with apt. e.g. you run sudo apt install firefox and it installs a Snap

      • It hasn’t gained traction with other distros like Flatpak has, and Canonical’s insistence on backing the “wrong” standard means Linux will continue to be more fragmented than it would be if they also went along with what has become the de facto standard

      There are however benefits of snaps. It works for better for terminal programs, and Canonical can even package system stuff like the kernel as a snap - as you can imagine, this might be a very powerful tool when it comes to an immutable version of Ubuntu.

      • Thwompthwomp@lemmy.world
        4·
        10 months ago

        Snaps just act strange. They update in weird ways, it’s always automatic and it’s confusing how to keep something in a version that won’t auto update. It’s been a bad experience for me.

      • umbrella@lemmy.ml
        3·
        10 months ago

        Snap startup times are awful, tens of seconds to open a simple text editor, even on an nvme ssd…

        edit: Also it doesnt bother following XDG specifications, further cluttering our home folders.

    • Zyratoxx@lemm.ee
      10·
      10 months ago
      • Flatpak is open source, Snap isn’t
      • Flatpak allows other repositories besides the official one, therefore having the ability to be decentralised, Snap doesn’t
      • Canonical (the company behind Snap and Ubuntu) is hated for some past decisions they made with Ubuntu
      • and more

      (The only thing I really prefer Snap over Flatpak is that you need the whole package name in Flatpak (like com.valvesoftware.Steam for Steam) whilst you can simply use “steam” in snap but that’s due to decentralisation vs centralisation I guess and overall a minor problem for me)