Canonical's Steam Snap is Causing Headaches for Valve - OMG! Ubuntu
www.omgubuntu.co.uk
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’ — though like Canonical’s Steam snap the Steam Flatpak is also unofficial, and no directly supported by Valve.

  • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
    7·
    10 months ago

    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.

      • bjorney@lemmy.ca
        12·
        10 months ago

        Every line of snap code that touches your computer is open source, so “closed off” is absolute hyperbole when you are discussing the format

        • ZephrC@lemm.ee
          3·
          10 months ago

          Canonical specifically went out of their way to create a closed ecosystem with snaps, and you think that’s not “closed off” because they only allow you to download the open source parts of the snap software?

          • bjorney@lemmy.ca
            13·
            10 months ago

            Which is why I phrased my above comment in the very precise and deliberate way I did.

            You don’t need to interface with canonical’s server to use snaps, you only need to do so if you want snaps that have been approved by and signed by canonical. Anyone can create a snap and privately distribute and install it, and every part of that process is open source.

    • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.com
      1·
      10 months ago

      I didnt want to hate snap either, until I found out its proprietary technology… on a foss OS… since then I‘m pretty over it - and ubuntu for that matter. I‘ll probably switch to debian once ubuntu 23.10 runs out of support.

      • ★ 𝐑𝐮𝐢𝐤𝐤𝐚𝐚𝐏𝐫𝐮𝐬 ★@lemmy.ml
        1·
        10 months ago

        Well… Flatpak ships Propietary Software too. And at this point Propietary Software is almost avoidable (unless you have a LibreBoot. I want one too). But it’s reasonable to be frustrated that an operating system as influential as Ubuntu has ended up falling so down in its technology, and that it has the support of a company like Chanonical.

        Edit: Thank you for the comments. I didn’t noticed Snap itself is propietary.

        • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.com
          2·
          10 months ago

          Not sure if I understand you correctly. Flatpak itself is not proprietary afaik and while people might make flatpaks of proprietary software, the problem with snap is that the snap system itself is proprietary afaik.

          So every open source software packaged in snap gets this proprietary stain added to it. Thats what actually bothers me.

        • arthur@lemmy.zipEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          I think they meant that the Snap itself (or part of it) is proprietary. But I’m not sure.

    • Lichtblitz@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      10 months ago

      Flatpak with Fedora 39 must have come a long way. Almost every tutorial with workarounds or discussion of broken features you can find online is now obsolete. It just works out of the box, especially under KDE. Mostly. That makes searching for actual issues extremely hard because I find myself chasing down paths of issues that have long been resolved.

      • unalivejoy@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        Agreed. the only “workarounds” I’ve needed to do (on arch) is install gtk-desktop-portal-{gtk,kde} because it’s not included with kde-plasma5 for some reason.

    • Dandroid@dandroid.app
      0·
      10 months ago

      My only complaint about flatpak is that updating them fails like 50% of the time for seemingly no reason, and I just have to run the update command over and over until they are all updated.

        • Dandroid@dandroid.app
          0·
          10 months ago

          It happens constantly both on my laptop (suse) and my Steam Deck (arch). Same exact behavior. I gave up trying to debug it, and I just keep retrying the update command until the list is empty.

          • PlexSheep@feddit.de
            0·
            10 months ago

            I’ve never had anything like this when I used to run arch (with Archivstall). Also not on fedora for months and now back on LMDE.

            • Dandroid@dandroid.app
              1·
              10 months ago

              How are you closing the program? I don’t mean with the X button on the desktop environment. I mean command line programs.

                • Dandroid@dandroid.app
                  1·
                  10 months ago

                  I’m sorry, I must have responded to the wrong comment. That comment was supposed to be in an entirely different conversation.

                  Edit: Oh, I just reviewed my inbox. I thought you replied to a different comment of mine. I’m so dumb. Carry on.

                  • PlexSheep@feddit.de
                    2·
                    10 months ago

                    Everything alright. We all have some days where just nothing seems to be working right and we make stupid mistakes.

                    Just this Monday was one for me, even reported an issue to the Ubuntu trackers and upstream, turned out I just had a typo in both my code and minimal working examples.

                    No biggie at the end of the day.

    • MonkderZweite@feddit.ch
      0·
      10 months ago

      and it’s probably not great that there are three competing formats for “applications with dependencies included”.

      Ok in snap/flatpak but i tink that’s a bit unfair in appimage. First two are runtimes, second is a file format that does stuff with fuse. That’s like saying there should only be one I/O scheduler.

      now it’s a bit more complicated

      Do native for system/environment stuff and simple projects, flatpak for frontend molochs with lots of dependencies, no?

      • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
        1·
        10 months ago

        I don’t think AppImage is a bad technology, but with the comparatively minuscule marketshare Linux desktop has barely any developer/software company can invest the resources to test and maintain packages in all these formats. It’s often not worth it for commercial software to offer packages in every possible format (yeah, yeah, open source is great, I know; still, commercial software is real and many people (need to) rely on it).

        I’ve been using Fedora for a couple of weeks (one of my New Year’s Resolutions is to completely ditch Windows, so my main computer is now on Fedora :D) and most of the software I use is either available in the official repositories, as an rpm or a Flatpak. But there’s the odd piece of software where I can only find AppImage or Snap versions, and often if a Flatpak is available, it’s non-official (Steam for example).

        So, you potentially have packages from the package manager (mostly deb- or rpm-based, and whatever format Arch uses), then you have AppImage, Snap and Flatpak and some applications are simply an archive with an executable binary. That’s a far cry from installing everything from one or two places, which I feel like used for be one of the selling points for Linux (years ago).

        Nothing most users can’t handle, but it could certainly be more streamlined. Now before I install software, I check the website, then I check whether they offer an official flatpak or an rpm package if it’s not in the official Fedora repositories, and if they don’t, I check if there’s an unofficial one on Flathub, which sometimes has implications. If there’s no Flatpak whatsoever, I fall back to standalone binaries/archives when available. It’s probably easier to install software on Windows now: download the installer from the official website, install it and done. Most software auto-updates itself.

        Having options is great and one of the great things about OSS, but I feel like when it comes to “standards” like these, more collaboration instead of reinventing the wheel over and over again would be better.

    • firecat@kbin.social
      0·
      10 months ago

      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@programming.dev
        1·
        7 months ago

        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@kbin.social
          02·
          10 months ago

          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.