Canonical's Steam Snap is Causing Headaches for Valve
Canonical's Steam Snap is Causing Headaches for Valve
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’
Ha. Flatpak got the honorable mention.
The big selling point of snap was getting packages directly from the developer instead of through maintainers. It’s strange that it’s using the maintainer model without Valve’s support
This smacks of 'Canonical realizes it has to shoehorn in all popular apps to make Snap capable of competing with Flatpak'. Steam is, for better or worse, one of the most popular applications in the world right now.
Right now, Canonical is doing the same thing Sony does whenever they try to float a new media format: Beg, Borrow, Steal, Blackmail, Bribe, and Bully anyone they can into using it to try to maintain some control over the future of that media. Also, right now, they're in the same place that Sony WAS in when VHS hit the market. Betamax/Snap was/is failing not just for technical reasons, but because it's bad for everyone around for one bully to control an entire market.
Snap is crap. It has been from the start, and it's only getting worse since then. It basically goes against anything thousands of developers worked for for decades: to save resources by making them shared and reusable.
Drives are huge and computers are so powerful now that it doesn't matter. It used to, but not any more. This philosophy also breaks things when two programs need conflicting versions of a library. Happens all the time.
I do not doubt an actual Valve developer, but last time I used the Steam Flatpak it couldn't connect to my Xbox Wireless Adapter while the Snap could and I noticed no issues with it.
But given none are affiliated with Valve, the .deb remains the best option.
This is why I still run out and grab the deb. Might not be the fanciest, or the "Linux way" but I just want my stuff to work.
What made you think flatpaks are the default way to do things on Linux? I’m actually curious? Its major advantage is allowing users to put newer software on systems that can’t provide it themselves. It solves a very specific problem. If you have the software available on your package manager, then that’s where you should get your package.
Did you allow it to do so?
It's a driver for a device plugged in - I have zero idea "how to allow it to do so" and I shouldn't have to know as the end user. It's assumed that if I run an application, it should be able to work with my standard USB peripherals as long as the devices themselves are already working in the system.
I had to drop the snap after a few months of it being OK enough but the Flatpak works great so all is well