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Do you game on Ubuntu or one of their flavours like Kubuntu or Xubuntu? Canonical want your help in further testing of the Steam snap. For anyone confused: there's many different types of packages on Linux. There's deb, rpm, flatpak, snap, appimage and more. Snap is what Canonical (who make Ubuntu) are rolling with.

Writing on their official Discourse forum, developer Ken VanDine mentioned they're hoping to have the snap of Steam out of Early Access soon and available to everyone.

In the post VanDine mentioned they've been "working feverishly to resolve issues and ensure it works well" and testing has been done across "the most popular Steam titles which should ‘just work’ based on reports on ProtonDB". But now they want more people to get involved to give their reports on how games work.

Details on how to get involved can be seen in the forum post.

The overall feeling you get from looking online is that snaps aren't particularly popular. However, is it just a case of a few people shouting above the rest? VanDine answered a few of my questions on that and more in an interview with GOL last year.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Misc, Steam, Ubuntu
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54 comments
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mr-victory Mar 17, 2023
Ah shit, here we go again...
Linuxer Mar 17, 2023
Nicee! Steam in a sandboxed snap sounds great. I hear this works lot better than the flatpak one. I generally use both snaps and flatpaks whatever is available
BlackBloodRum Mar 17, 2023
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Nicee! Steam in a sandboxed snap sounds great. I hear this works lot better than the flatpak one. I generally use both snaps and flatpaks whatever is available
What issues does the flatpak one have? I've been using it for several months now without issues?
Linuxer Mar 17, 2023
Nicee! Steam in a sandboxed snap sounds great. I hear this works lot better than the flatpak one. I generally use both snaps and flatpaks whatever is available
What issues does the flatpak one have? I've been using it for several months now without issues?

i don't know. sometimes in packages snap works better and sometimes flatpak and sometimes theres no differrence
dziadulewicz Mar 17, 2023
I have started to like Snaps more and more. They work really well now! They also fixed this bug now: https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapd/+bug/1980271
Ananace Mar 17, 2023
Amusingly enough, Steam has been using a fork of Flatpak for their own runtime for a while at this point, so I guess this means people will soon be running Flatpak inside of Snap.
Linas Mar 17, 2023
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I don't have anything against snaps as such, but the way Canonical are pushing them onto users feels disrespectful. Like if you apt install firefox, it will pull in snapd, and install the snap package of Firefox. Not quite what I expected the system to do.
Klaas Mar 17, 2023
Not quite what I expected the system to do.
Who would expect that? It's deliberately doing something else instead what it was told to do…
BlackBloodRum Mar 17, 2023
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Not quite what I expected the system to do.
Who would expect that? It's deliberately doing something else instead what it was told to do…
Which ironically, goes against what the CLI always had the advantage over a GUI of:

Type what you want, it does it immediately and only does what you asked it to do.

Unlike a GUI where you have to go hunting for the option for 15 minutes first. Yes Windows, I'm looking at you.
sarmad Mar 17, 2023
I don't have anything against snaps as such, but the way Canonical are pushing them onto users feels disrespectful. Like if you apt install firefox, it will pull in snapd, and install the snap package of Firefox. Not quite what I expected the system to do.

I personally like Snaps, but what you mention is definitely wrong behaviour. If you don't want to maintain the deb package then just remove it from the repo and let people know that they need to install it from snap or just install it on their own from somewhere else.
soulsource Mar 17, 2023
A Mozilla developer posted about Snap (and Flatpak) just recently, and I think it's a very interesting read.

Original thread:
https://fosstodon.org/@gabrielesvelto/109976029692454638

Follow-Up with links to the bug-reports:
https://fosstodon.org/@gabrielesvelto/109981179869984715
CatKiller Mar 17, 2023
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A Mozilla developer posted about Snap (and Flatpak) just recently, and I think it's a very interesting read.
Especially since it was Mozilla that asked Canonical to replace the repository version of Firefox with the snap.
sudoer Mar 17, 2023
Well done corp world... a container in a container. Unneccessary complexity for the sake of corp agendas. Does Proton even work with this.
Tuxee Mar 17, 2023
Well done corp world... a container in a container. Unneccessary complexity for the sake of corp agendas. Does Proton even work with this.

What "agenda"?
ElectricPrism Mar 17, 2023
 

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BlackBloodRum Mar 18, 2023
  • Supporter Plus
Well done corp world... a container in a container. Unneccessary complexity for the sake of corp agendas. Does Proton even work with this.

ISV's ISV's !!

add Steve Ballmer meme
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs

(Fun fact, this video was uploaded 14 years ago... feel old?)
slaapliedje Mar 18, 2023
Well done corp world... a container in a container. Unneccessary complexity for the sake of corp agendas. Does Proton even work with this.

What "agenda"?
Every corporation has an agenda... to make money. Canonical's best way to make money is to try to get as much vendor lock-in that they can, without pissing off the community enough that someone switches to a different distro. Snap and them being the only ones who can host a snap store is their method of lock-in.
CatKiller Mar 18, 2023
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Every corporation has an agenda... to make money. Canonical's best way to make money is to try to get as much vendor lock-in that they can, without pissing off the community enough that someone switches to a different distro. Snap and them being the only ones who can host a snap store is their method of lock-in.
That's just nonsense. Canonical make zero money from desktop Ubuntu users. They make money, like Red Hat/IBM do, by offering paid support and services. Snaps make that hugely easier for their actual customers, and for themselves as maintainers. They might also have made money from the Ubuntu Phone, which snaps were largely created for, but they ran out of money before that could become a thing.

Snaps only come from one place to solve the discovery issue that PPAs have, and which Fedora users experience from flatpaks where they have access to some flatpaks but not all of them. All the snaps are available in one place - accessible by default for Ubuntu users and trivial to add for users of other distros (except Mint, who put up additional barriers in the way of user choice).
Purple Library Guy Mar 18, 2023
Every corporation has an agenda... to make money. Canonical's best way to make money is to try to get as much vendor lock-in that they can, without pissing off the community enough that someone switches to a different distro. Snap and them being the only ones who can host a snap store is their method of lock-in.
That's just nonsense. Canonical make zero money from desktop Ubuntu users. They make money, like Red Hat/IBM do, by offering paid support and services. Snaps make that hugely easier for their actual customers, and for themselves as maintainers. They might also have made money from the Ubuntu Phone, which snaps were largely created for, but they ran out of money before that could become a thing.

Snaps only come from one place to solve the discovery issue that PPAs have, and which Fedora users experience from flatpaks where they have access to some flatpaks but not all of them. All the snaps are available in one place - accessible by default for Ubuntu users and trivial to add for users of other distros (except Mint, who put up additional barriers in the way of user choice).
+ Click to view long quote
slaapliedje might be overstating, but so are you. Doing it up a bit too brown there, especially when we started this Snap conversation with the exact bit that got Mint annoyed.
Scytale Mar 18, 2023
At this point I have to ask why a community should help make their commercial product better for free while it doesn't help the ecosystem.
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