- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.world
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.
You must log in or # to comment.
I’m sure Canonical’s neverending death march towards Snap, along with the OS running outdated packages, is why Valve no longer uses Ubuntu for SteamOS development. The greatest April Fools was Ubuntu dropping Snaps because so many people were saying how they could go back to using Ubuntu again…then they noticed it was a joke and the sadness set in.
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).
-
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.
deleted by creator
-
Would be cool if they just straight up supported flatpaks. That’s been my main way of gaming for a couple years now, and it works great. The downside is that the folder structure is confusing so it makes things like modding pretty difficult.
or, you know, you can use your distro packages
or, you know, you could use a much better and consistent platform
I use debian, I’m happy and definitely have no idea what you are talking about :)
Debian is one of the distros where flatpaks are most appropriate lol, it’s the best way to not have programs that are really old
Adding weird third party repositories that can cause all kinds of issues probably isn’t the best idea
tbf, flatpaks are problematic shit noobs tend to appreciate because reasons. That said, beside the fact steam ships its own chroot, I’m a happy sid user and I don’t even have this imaginary problem of things being ‘very old’ sooo … but I can confirm you shouldn’t add weird third party repos or shitty flatpaks :)
It’s not just noobs that appreciate flatpak. Flatpak is good all-round.
And the problem of Debian packages being old is very much not imaginary lol. Debian has only just moved beyond Gnome 3.38/Plasma 5.20/kernel version 5.10.
That’s ancient. And that’s not to mention the other software repos, which are often updated at an even slower pace.
Don’t assume that just because you want extremely outdated packages, everyone else must want the same.
you normally skip reading half of the comments you reply to, eh? :) ciao ciao from my debian system which does everything, including paying my rent and a bit more, w/o this shit ;)
