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PayPalCanonical 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.
Writing on Mastodon, developer Timothee "TTimo" Besset, who works on various things for Valve posted asking people to consider using the official Valve .deb package or at least consider using the Flatpak:
Valve is seeing an increasing number of bug reports for issues caused by Canonical's repackaging of the Steam client through snap.
The best way to install Steam on Debian and derivative operating systems is to follow the instructions at http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ and use the official .deb
We are not involved with the snap repackaging. It has a lot of issues.
If you don't want the .deb, please at least consider the flatpak version.
Timothee "TTimo" Besset
So if you've been having various problems with Steam on Ubuntu (or a derivative like Kubuntu), it may be because you've installed it as a Snap. Worth trying out the official .deb or Flatpak to see if it runs better for you. You can also give Canonical feedback in your issues on their Discourse Forum and report issues to Valve on GitHub (if you're using their official packages).
Hopefully Canonical can look into any issues.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
ssj17vegeta Jan 17
Would be great if Valve would officially support Steam Flatpak, it would cover a lot more distros than just the Debian family but I believe it wouldn't be that much more work since it uses specific versions of Flatpak runtimes.
Edit: Also, funny how they hired more devs to work on Snap support in other distros while their own doesn't work properly yet.
Last edited by kerossin on 17 January 2024 at 6:25 pm UTC
Kimyrielle Jan 17
PublicNuisance Jan 17
A lot of work has also been done to make it even more suitable for GUI applications. For example, Firefox works with the integration of GNOME extensions, unlike the flatpak version.
Please also note that practically all STS releases have been partly experimental, so Steam is offered there in snap format.
And finally, it is Canonical itself that monitors this client and does not hide it. If many complain specifically to Valve that the snap client does not work well, then the problem is precisely the misunderstanding by users, and not that "snap is bad." This would be true for flatpak if it had a similar problem.
Disclaimer: An active Ubuntu fan since 2017 :)
It crashed and rebooted my whole system.
Last edited by pb on 17 January 2024 at 9:03 pm UTC
Quoting: KimyrielleI am thinking of a really compelling reason to containerize Steam and can't come up with one...Not even one? I have an easy one. First, Steam is proprietary. Valve does do a lot of great FOSS work, and they are generally trustworthy, but Steam itself is still proprietary at the end of the day. And it has made catastrophic mistakes before. Containerizing it limits the scope of the damage it can possibly do.
That's not it, either. I have about... 800+ additional reasons, at least in my Steam library. A whole litany of proprietary, closed-source games. Only a fraction of them are native, and would have hypothetically unfettered access to the whole filesystem when unsandboxed, but that's enough to prefer to be safe rather than sorry. Steam does have its own container runtimes, Soldier and Sniper, but most native binaries don't use them. Proton is their main consumer, actually.
But containerization isn't just about sandboxing. It's about smoothing over the differences between distros that can randomly break applications. Providing libraries that are consistent and compatible across all base distros. You can even have glibc in a musl distro. The custom set of libraries provided by your base distro are a good thing for your system apps and desktop environment, but not so good for binary-only applications. By containerizing Steam, you can give it the consistent, stable libraries that it wants for its games, while letting your system apps and desktop environment continue to take advantage of your base distro's custom libraries. Because of this, more than anything else, Flathub's Steam package is more likely to work than whatever your base distro is doing to adapt the .deb provided by Valve.
Last edited by TiZ on 17 January 2024 at 7:43 pm UTC
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