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.
Well, no, neither approach is better than the other, it’s apples and oranges.
There will always be a place for installing native applications. In the least analysis, the container itself should probably have some dependencies packaged for the target program.
The benefits of containerisation are obvious, but it’s been a lot of work and there are still edge cases to iron out.
FreeBSD has had jails since 2000. Linux, however, only got namespaces in 2008 and the first bubblewrap release on GitHub was 2016.
I’ve been using chroots and containers for development for about 2 years now and it’s been fantastic, however, I’m still grateful I don’t have to jump inside one every time I need to write a python script.
Honestly, I’m on NixOS and it’s not a bother because it saves time down the line when your script would break during a system upgrade which it doesn’t on NixOS as without you telling it to, it will still use all the old dependencies. Also you already have a couple of
flake.nixfloating around you can just copy and adjust and direnv does the rest.