Valve seeing increasing bug reports due to Steam Snap - other methods recommended
Canonical announced some time ago their Steam Snap which was promoted as stable with Ubuntu 23.04, as they continue to push their own packaging format with Snap but it seems this has been causing problems for Valve.
We are not involved with the snap repackaging.
I would argue this is the most important sentence in this article.
Not really, usually Steam packages on distributions aren't maintained by Valve. The only exception are .debs from their website. Even the Steam flatpak is community maintained.
I've had no issues with steam on nixos/nixpkgs. Flatpak also had it's fair share of bugs and games not working because of flatpak and proton using bubblewrap for sandboxing. Snaps sandboxing might cause those issues too, so hopefully they'll be fixed at some point (or even better, Ubuntu switches to flatpak for desktop apps).
I know it’s because it’s horribly insecure, but it’s kinda funny that fucking winget of all things is one of the only package managers that install Steam without issue.
P.S. I’m a hybrid Windows/Linux user, pls don’t kill me
Edit: insecure and barely a package manager, but works roughly like one for an end user
This time they said if you don't want the deb to use flatpak.
Actually it's Valves responsibility to tell the snap packager to kindly fuck off and don't fuck this up for us.
Ive only had issues with the snap or Flatpack versions. At least the Flatpack one is open source.
Fwiw, the steam snap is open source
The article also is too favorable for Valve and doesn’t mention alternative methods. The billion dollar company should allow people to install games on their browsers. The client is nothing but an analytics and tracker. There’s no benefit, just like there’s no benefit in XBox or PS4/5 achievements or their features.
You're kidding right? The Steam client is overflowing with features, beyond the nice and simple mod manager, multiplayey systems for easy joining it also has a full featured discord alternative inside the chat system with voice and text chat and I think even screen sharing. To compare it to Xbox achievements is just insane for how much the steam client provides.
The billion dollar company should allow people to install games on their browsers
How should that work?
Why is it Valves responsibility to provide alternative install methods? If you genuinely believe it isn't providing value just don't use Steam to buy games if you don't want to install using it.
Of course. Because snaps fucking SUCK.
All my homies hate snaps.
most functional snap package
With the flatpak it barely even matters which distro you use. Flatpak steam & mesa and go play some games. I game on Debian stable now.
I been moving my systems to Debian stable, thanks to flatpak and backports.
Why they don't take over the work and make it official with support is beyond me though.
The flatpak version hammers my DNS-server when downloading it isn't funny anymore, 100s requests a minute for the same domains, it ignores the TTL too.
I think they also use the flatpak version on Steamdeck? Really weird.
I've never read so many words I know and been so confused by how they were used before in my life
Edit: oh this is a Linux gaming thing, didn't see where I was. I thought I had all the Linux communities filtered. Oh well ignore this
I tried to install steam on Ubuntu 22.04 and I just see the snap version. Is it true that we cannot run sudo apt install steam anymore?
The day they started pushing snaps into APT and making it a pain to choose the non-snap version... I left Ubuntu. If I wanted to install the snap I would've used snap install not apt install
Use the flatpak
Sorry I found it this is the best sudo add-apt-repository multiverse sudo apt install steam
valve always recommends native deb and my experience with deb is flawless so far
