Canonical's Steam Snap is Causing Headaches for Valve

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.

thecookingsenpai,
@thecookingsenpai@lemmy.world avatar

Tbh i never found an app that runs better on snap than on deb

Same goes for almost anything like snap

moon,

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.

superbirra,

or, you know, you can use your distro packages

moon,

or, you know, you could use a much better and consistent platform

superbirra,

I use debian, I’m happy and definitely have no idea what you are talking about :)

TheGrandNagus,

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

superbirra,

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 :)

OsrsNeedsF2P,

Steam’s runtime is already sandbox-ception. Flatpak might be more appealing to Valve than it seems.

superbirra,

I see no value in switching from current situation (in-repo deb pkg + steam autoupdates) to flat/snap/farts, which I don’t use at all…

OsrsNeedsF2P,

It’s not about you, it’s about what’s easier for Valve. If Valve is fine packaging, and getting bug reports, from all the different distributions, they’ll keep doing things as is. But as a Linux app developer myself, I exclusively publish to Flatpak because it guarantees everyone has the same system.

superbirra,

you’re at best uninformed about how the process actually works and what’s the role of a distro maintainer, a distro project, upstream authors. Not that every piece of software has enough value to be included in this process so maybe it will make sense to package your stuff by yourself.

FrankTheHealer,

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.

xe3,

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.

planish,

Linux hobbyists

Who else has opinions on snaps vs. flatpacks? Are they distinct to the “Linux professional” somehow?

el_bhm,

Yes? How is this a question?

cupcakezealot,
@cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Canonical’s Steam Snap is Causing Headaches for Valve

krellor,

The article says that steam showing a notice on snap installs that it isn't an official package and to report errors to snap would be extreme. But that seems pretty reasonable to me, especially since the small package doesn't include that in its own description. Is there any reason why that would be considered extreme, in the face of higher than normal error rates with the package, and lack of appropriate package description?

teawrecks,

Honestly, that seems like the nicest way to solve the problem. Afaik Valve would be fully within their rights to C&D them from unofficially rehosting their binaries. In any other situation, that would be a blatant security risk.

narc0tic_bird,

I don’t even want to hate on Snap, I just think Flatpak is probably superior in almost every way and it’s probably not great that there are three competing formats for “applications with dependencies included”. It was supposed to be “package your app to this format, dear developer, so everyone can use it no matter the distro they use”, now it’s a bit more complicated. Frustrating, as this means developers without that many resources will only offer some formats and whichever you (or your distro) prefers might not be available.

I know that you can get every format to work on every distro (AppImages are just single binaries you can execute), but each has their own first class citizen.

By the way, the unofficial Steam Flatpak has been working well for me under Fedora 39 KDE Spin, but an official one would be great to have.

firecat,

Just tell the billion dollar company to allow people to download the games on their browser. The Client only exists as a means to DRM and analytics, there’s no actual reason for games not to become standalone.

MajorHavoc, (edited )

That’s pretty unfair. Before Valve’s efforts, the first thing we PC gamers asked eachother about a new game was always “could you get it running?”

Three bad old days were quite bad, and they started getting better in lock step with Valve’s improvements to Steam.

Correlation/causation and all that. But for a lot of us Valve earned a lot of goodwill simply by allowing “request a refund” on games that run poorly. (Edit: which was apparently forced on Valve by a government. Valve got lucky there!)

firecat,

As someone who was during those times, your Zgen knowledge is very incorrect. The games did work, including Crisis (original). As to why the myth you hear from fellow Zgen gamers; it’s because graphics cards were invented. Brand new, no one knew what they were doing with them. The companys Renzen and Nvidia started sponsoring games, it’s how they became popular, their logos were part of the game, Metal Gear Solid revengeance is proof of this.

Steam had no part in gaming history, they were not the first online platform. Dell made wild target before Valve Corporation was founded. Lootbox was invented before Steam launched it, Yahoo games (anyone remember them) in japan had the concept down to almost todays standards. Valve had nothing to do with gaming history, they are just known for their lawsuits and anti competitive behavior.

TheGrandNagus,

Steam had no part in gaming history, they were not the first online platform.

Lmao. This is like saying the iPhone or iPad had no part in smartphone/tablet history, because neither were first to the market. It’s a ludicrous take.

Valve had nothing to do with gaming history

Lol

they are just known for their lawsuits and anti competitive behavior.

I’m willing to bet this isn’t true lol. Valve is only known for anti-competitive behaviour? Come off it.

firecat,

The Iphone wasn’t part of touchscreen technology either. They were just the first to try heating sensors. It’s still being used in android devices too. The ability to use physical sensors is gone. Apple killed it off.

Valve is in a lawsuit, do your research next time: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/antitrust/valve-loses-bid-to-end-antitrust-case-over-steam-gaming-platform

TheGrandNagus,

Lmao

TimLovesTech,
@TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social avatar

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.

chrishazfun,
@chrishazfun@lemmy.world avatar

That’s gotta be the funniest backfire for an April Fools’ joke I’ve seen in a while lmao

QuaternionsRock,

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,
  • 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.

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