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.

swag_money,

guys hear me out. steam os: debian edition

shasta,

This is not a problem with steam OS though

HawlSera,

Okay…

What’s a Steam Snap? I don’t know what that is

Reil,

Snaps are a relatively recent way of packaging application installations in certain flavors of Linux. Steam is Valve’s game distribution platform (amongst other things).

There’s an unofficial Snap package to install Steam and it apparently doesn’t work so good

Falcon,

Snap is a sandboxed environment to install applications in.

Flatpak is a more portable implementation of the same broad idea, it downloads a chroot and runs applications from within using a separate program called bubblewrap (one could, in theory, use chroot to run apps from within the downloaded flatpak images, bubblewrap offers further isolation through things like namespaces and cgroups etc. )

Snap, unlike flatpak, is a Canonical specific implementation that has a reputation for breaking a lot of things.

barsoap, (edited )

It’s perfectly possible to isolate a steam install, NixOS does that by default to even get it running (on NixOS nothing is where any binary blob expects it to be). There was a very brief issue with experimental steam when they tightened up their own sandboxing and doing sandbox-in-sandbox broke stuff but that was fixed before release as Valve is, indeed, responsive, even if the distribution isn’t officially supported. But you gotta have some professionalism and have institutional continuity, they don’t want to deal with J. Random Hacker doing a one-off packaging job. Or distros trying to be smart and replace the steam runtime with their own library versions. Basically, assume that the whole thing runs directly on the kernel, make sure to have graphics drivers, and you’ll be fine running it as-is.

captain_aggravated,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

Snap is Canonical’s (developers of Ubuntu) attempt at their own containerized software package format, conceptually similar to Flatpak in some ways but differing in details of implementation. One major note is the back end is kept closed source so you cannot host your own Snap repo, which ruffles some feathers.

Apparently distributing Steam (Valve’s video game store/launcher) in Snap format is causing some problems.

Neon,

Don’t they own the Code?

Can’t they just cease-and-desist them if they cause them trouble?

UnaSolaEstrellaLibre,

Kinda saw this coming sooner or later.

I remember asking in one of their articles if they had planned to reign over (or partner up) the project over to Valve once it was ready and said they had no plans.

NaNABCV,
@NaNABCV@lemmy.world avatar

A good reason to dual boot

Gingernate,

Or use flatpak or .deb

woelkchen,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

Why dual boot with Fedora when you can just use it exclusively?

Gingernate,

You spelled openSuse wrong.

I use fedora BTW lol

woelkchen, (edited )
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

You spelled openSuse wrong.

openSUSE

FTFY

OsrsNeedsF2P,

“snaps are slow and buggy! I’m gonna use Windowzzz!!”

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