Canonical going 'all in' on gaming for Ubuntu, new Steam Snap package in testing

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: user1

Quoting: scaineThat's a great turnaround from a few years ago, when the threatened removal of 32-bit libraries would have crippled the O/S from a gaming perspective.

A better gaming experience in what is still an incredibly popular "entry" distro is superb news.

You know what I think? Making a SNAP Steam is exactly the first step towards removal of the last few remaining 32 bit libraries in Ubuntu (the original plan was to remove ALL 32 bit libraries, but because of backlash, the final decision was to keep a few 32 bit libraries used by popular software). I mean think about it, Steam and Wine are the 2 most popular pieces of software that still require 32 bit dependencies. By making a SNAP Steam, Canonical will then be able to proceed removing those remaining 32 bit libraries (and also removing .deb Steam in the process). Regarding Wine, I heard it's also available as a Snap.

I'm surprised nobody here is asking himself the question what is even the benefit of having a SNAP Steam, when .deb Steam is working perfectly?
So to me it seems that in the case of creating a SNAP Steam, Canonical is just masquerading itself as "caring about gamers", but under the hood it's just part of the plan to remove the final remaining 32 bit libraries and push their SNAP garbage.

I'm so tired of Canonical's bull**** and so glad I've switched to Fedora after a few years of mainly using Ubuntu based distros.

I stopped using Ubuntu before it was cool to do so.

Ha, they stopped being relevant to me when the changed their 'let's be Debian, with the latest Gnome and 6 month release cycles to match Gnome's purpose they had at the beginning.

I am positive their push for ditching 32bit support was because they figured if Apple could do it, why can't they? There is no technical reason for Ubuntu to do so, unlike for Apple as they knew they were moving toward ARM... pretty sad to see the amount of native mac games that won't run after Mojave.

Someone mentioned Arch ditching 32bit support? Pretty sure they have always had the separate multi architecture repo, similar to Debian needing to add it in.

There are actual programs that simply can't be ported to 64bit (or it would take some significant effort" so dropping it is the equivalent of trashing all that past work. Part of why there are software preservation groups these days.

Of course there are technical reasons for ditching 32-bit support (I'm a maintainer for the software my company distributes and I decided to ditch 32-bit support due to technical reasons). It takes time and resources to build an entire arch of your distribution, on top of which you have to provide actual support, for an arch where you have very few users. That Canonical reversed their decision when there was a backlash indicates to me that they simply didn't understand the need for 32-bit libs to support games, they obviously only thought that it was about running Ubuntu on 32-bit hardware.

Those aren't technical reasons. Those are resource reasons.

True, got me there, does it matter though? The point I was trying to make is that they had reasons which was not "let's screw gamers and Steam".


Last edited by F.Ultra on 2 May 2022 at 12:10 am UTC

Quoting: 3zekielFor the "do_something_on_your_own" I indeed do not imply that there is already a competitor in itself. Indeed, upstart came first, and snap more or less at the same time.
My meaning is more that they always do it on their own, there's hardly ever a community going around, they rarely, if ever, involve other distributions, and so on and so forth. Snap is the pinnacle of that, where the server side is even proprietary and fully centralized to them - I think they alleviated some of that, but not sure at all, and it clearly wasn't used by anyone -.

This is incredibly disingenous. Sure, Snap's backend is proprietary, but in practical terms, so is Flatpak's backend - everyone uses Flathub (I'm aware a couple of distros do host their own instance - but they could do so with snaps too). Constantly banging on about "ooh, but the backend is proprietary" is just noise. GitHub is a proprietary back-end, but very few developers moved away from it when MS moved in (despite the additional threat of co-pilot). We live in a weird world when Linux users are giving MS a pass that they won't hand out to Canonical.

What I love about Canonical is that when they see a problem, they try to push patches upstream, but if those patches are rejected (e.g. Unity & Mir), they create their way around the problem. This is what Linux is. This is what makes Linux so special. Fork! Be unique! 20+ Desktop Environments! 40+ media players! 10+ init systems! 20+ package managers! 40+ (easily) file systems! I could go on - shells, browsers, file managers, calculators, window managers, programming languages. They all exist because someone said "I can do this fundamentally better" and whether they were right or wrong, I'm here for it.

Weirdly though, when Canonical do this, suddenly it's "they're not collaborating", or they suffer from "not invented here" syndrome.

Drives me nuts, just so much hypocrisy.

Quoting: scaineWeirdly though, when Canonical do this, suddenly it's "they're not collaborating", or they suffer from "not invented here" syndrome.

Maybe because they are not collaborating? Microsoft has upstreamed more code to the Linux kernel than Canonical has, for example.

Instead of pushing Wayland forward, they create Mir. When Gnome-shell first started out, instead of adding some coders to the pool, they decided to do their own thing with Unity, etc. They keep claiming they can do it better / faster, when they should have treated these core components as a community and pitched in. They fork because they want to be THE Linux Distro. But instead all they do is divide people.

Quoting: scaine

Quoting: 3zekielFor the "do_something_on_your_own" I indeed do not imply that there is already a competitor in itself. Indeed, upstart came first, and snap more or less at the same time.
My meaning is more that they always do it on their own, there's hardly ever a community going around, they rarely, if ever, involve other distributions, and so on and so forth. Snap is the pinnacle of that, where the server side is even proprietary and fully centralized to them - I think they alleviated some of that, but not sure at all, and it clearly wasn't used by anyone -.

This is incredibly disingenous. Sure, Snap's backend is proprietary, but in practical terms, so is Flatpak's backend - everyone uses Flathub (I'm aware a couple of distros do host their own instance - but they could do so with snaps too). Constantly banging on about "ooh, but the backend is proprietary" is just noise. GitHub is a proprietary back-end, but very few developers moved away from it when MS moved in (despite the additional threat of co-pilot). We live in a weird world when Linux users are giving MS a pass that they won't hand out to Canonical.

What I love about Canonical is that when they see a problem, they try to push patches upstream, but if those patches are rejected (e.g. Unity & Mir), they create their way around the problem. This is what Linux is. This is what makes Linux so special. Fork! Be unique! 20+ Desktop Environments! 40+ media players! 10+ init systems! 20+ package managers! 40+ (easily) file systems! I could go on - shells, browsers, file managers, calculators, window managers, programming languages. They all exist because someone said "I can do this fundamentally better" and whether they were right or wrong, I'm here for it.

Weirdly though, when Canonical do this, suddenly it's "they're not collaborating", or they suffer from "not invented here" syndrome.

Drives me nuts, just so much hypocrisy.

So! Bloody! True!
Thank you

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: scaineWeirdly though, when Canonical do this, suddenly it's "they're not collaborating", or they suffer from "not invented here" syndrome.

Maybe because they are not collaborating? Microsoft has upstreamed more code to the Linux kernel than Canonical has, for example.

U serious? Comparing a company with 180.000 employees to Canonical? Besides, MS pushes upstream whatever fits their very own agenda (which is perfectly fine). And I assume MS commits automatically translate to many lines of code.

QuoteInstead of pushing Wayland forward, they create Mir. When Gnome-shell first started out, instead of adding some coders to the pool, they decided to do their own thing with Unity, etc. They keep claiming they can do it better / faster, when they should have treated these core components as a community and pitched in.

Since Wayland/X11 replaced Mir in 2017 AND the alleged lack of commitment and upstream activity by Canonical: Would it had made ANY difference? And Wayland way is still NOT the default protocol/server/compositor on many distributions.
As far as Gnome Shell goes: Are you equally vocal towards the Cinammon developers? Or pretty much all other DEs out there aside from maybe Gnome and KDE? Gnome Shell had it's initial release in April 2011, Unity about one year earlier. So why should Canonical have abandoned it? Why did everyone "embrace" the Red Hat alternative (apart from the Cinnamon and MATE people)? (Do I get the "t'was the licensing" answer?)

QuoteBut instead all they do is divide people.

No. Actually not. I'd say the majority of Linux users don't give a shit. I never felt the urge to pop up in some Red Hat/Fedora forums and bash away at flatpak. I use whatever I consider useful (and which gets its fair share of support) - and I hope I share this sentiment with most other Linux users. BTW: Did you blame Red Hat for "dividing people" because of systemd? Are the people behind Cinnamon dividing people?
Just to be clear: I really couldn't care less, what DEs, packaging system, init system, file system, whatever people use. Hell, I even talk to Windows folk. But whenever Canonical "intends to do something" (let alone does something) people get all mad as if their very existence depends on a distribution they presumably don't even use. That's just... tiring.

Quoting: scaineDrives me nuts, just so much hypocrisy.

Spot on. Sorry for pretty much just re-iterating your point in my post a second time.

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: scaineWeirdly though, when Canonical do this, suddenly it's "they're not collaborating", or they suffer from "not invented here" syndrome.

Maybe because they are not collaborating? Microsoft has upstreamed more code to the Linux kernel than Canonical has, for example.

Instead of pushing Wayland forward, they create Mir. When Gnome-shell first started out, instead of adding some coders to the pool, they decided to do their own thing with Unity, etc. They keep claiming they can do it better / faster, when they should have treated these core components as a community and pitched in. They fork because they want to be THE Linux Distro. But instead all they do is divide people.

Wow, the kernel argument, eh? Haven't heard that in years! Canonical aren't kernel developers - the only reason MS contributes is to ensure Linux runs on Azure. Meanwhile, outside of kernel commits, yes, they collaborated so, so much - they just got pushed out of a lot of it.

Unity - upstream patches to Gnome were straight out rejected, and their vision for widgets on the top bar rejected (ironic, since, yep, client-side decorations are a thing now). That vision precluded them using extensions, hence Unity, where they made real on other promises like global menu and HUD.

Mir - they needed certain features for their display manager that would fit into their requirements around phone interfaces. Surprise - the Wayland devs rejected their requests. Mir was born. Wayland devs cried like babies for literally years over this decision. Infuriating.

There are other examples. The discussions are generally public and I lived through them. I honestly don't want to regurgitate them again, but people keep jumping down Canonicals throat over this stuff and it's simply ignorant to place all that "blame" at Canonical's door. Sure, Canonical weren't always the good guy in this stuff, but it's regularly and unfairly overblown to be all their fault, they never collaborate, it's all about them, blah blah.

Quoting: slaapliedjeThey fork because they want to be THE Linux Distro. But instead all they do is divide people.

Eh? They ARE "the" linux distro. They have been for decades. THEY STILL ARE, despite quite a few mis-steps in recent years and some momentum around Arch. They don't divide people - they have, by far, the biggest community in the Linux "world". For a long time, people argued (myself included, although I don't really feel that way any more) that we should stop referring to Linux and start referring to Ubuntu. Ubuntu, for well over a decade, was just that synonymous with Linux as a whole. Well, desktop Linux anyway. Things like OMGUbuntu! and Ask Ubuntu, they happened for a reason.

Maybe that will change, but regardless of what distro we use here, as experienced players of games on Linux, almost everyone here would recommend Ubuntu, or a derivative like Mint or Pop, to a first-time user. Why? Because it's still the defacto standard. And they didn't get that way by being divisive. Quite the opposite. It's just that certain loud voices didn't like that they weren't number one any more.

Quoting: Tuxee

Quoting: scaineDrives me nuts, just so much hypocrisy.

Spot on. Sorry for pretty much just re-iterating your point in my post a second time.

Too late! I went on a big rant! Goddamit!

Quoting: scaineEh? They ARE "the" linux distro. They have been for decades. THEY STILL ARE, despite quite a few mis-steps in recent years and some momentum around Arch. They don't divide people - they have, by far, the biggest community in the Linux "world". For a long time, people argued (myself included, although I don't really feel that way any more) that we should stop referring to Linux and start referring to Ubuntu.

OK, that, that right there, strikes me as a reason some people might have started to get shirty about Ubuntu, no matter what the rights and wrongs of Mir and Unity and whatnot.

Quoting: scaineAnd they didn't get that way by being divisive.

Nope, they got that way by making a better Debian release. Which then became a fork and they did their own thing, that then irritates people as it breaks some compatibility. But that has been the history of Debian. Someone makes a distro based on it, it starts out great, but because they get separate repositories, and try their hardest to keep in sync, but then eventually they can't keep the customizations up, and they die because it becomes too much effort for the developers.

Ubuntu has only survived this long because of Mark Shuttleworth having money.

It still isn't 'the' Linux distro, as there is no such thing. A lot of people don't even recommend it anymore. I now recommend Pop_OS! Or if they want to give me the time to set it up for them, I recommend Debian Stable.