Valve seeing increasing bug reports due to Steam Snap - other methods recommended

Ah, snaps. Such a good idea. And yet, such perfect failure in being unable to prove yourself to be a comparable/better alternative to Flatpak in terms of GUI apps.

Despite happily using snaps in my Ubuntu Server, this is why I swear by Flatpak for most GUI apps and Nix for everything else, with Conty and Distrobox use here and there.

I am thinking of a really compelling reason to containerize Steam and can't come up with one...

I for one would rather not deal with 32-bit dependencies. WoW64 making it to Wine 9.0 as experiment made me so happy because NOW I can see Steam dropping 32-bit dependencies in 2025.

Other than that, there's the case of immutable distro, and overall just making it work well as apps installed on user's home, as well as working around whatever weirdness any distro would have going on in their packaging policies.

I've been running Steam Flatpak on openSUSE Tumbleweed for over a year (maybe 2 years, can't remember) and had no problems.

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.

Don't they already support flatpak version of Steam? Isn't that what the Steamdeck uses? (Maybe not, I'd have to look).

Valve officially only supports one distro and that is the latest Ubuntu LTS - with either Gnome or KDE desktop. They also only officially support one way one installing the client and that is the official .deb. SteamOS is using Arch so the client is packaged by Valve themselves but no other devices that Steam Decks are officially supported - yet.

Even though Valve is doing a lot of cool things they are still a small company (by headcount). I think the chances of Valve dedicating resources to support more than one distro, or more than one way of installing Steam, are slim. Maybe Flatpak could replace deb and SteamOS replace Ubuntu LTS in the future.

Valve posted asking people to consider using the official Valve .deb package

Please, please, please, please not!
I'm raeding nearly every thread in the Steam for Linux forum, and we hear problems from people having used the downloadable deb for over a decade now! People should use what their distribution made of it, adding their dependencies and such. I cannot believe Valve proposes to actually use that!

What problems? I have been using the official .deb for over a year and it has worked fine. It's not flawless but there are issues with the Flatpak version as well.

What problems? I have been using the official .deb for over a year and it has worked fine. It's not flawless but there are issues with the Flatpak version as well.

Probably dependency issues, which is at the heart of the infamous "Yes, do as I say," in the LTT Linux Challenge.

Steam Flatpak has its issues, but it gets people arriving to the "I can install the game, I can play the game," faster with less risk (assuming you're not having to deal with your secondary drives/partitions at least).

Lmaoooooooo get rekt Snap users

I am thinking of a really compelling reason to containerize Steam and can't come up with one...

It's been said before, but do you really feel comfortable with every random game having full access to your whole file system?!

TBF, i really can't think of any reason to NOT containerize things like Game(s/-launchers) or Browsers whereever possible on anything but a pure gaming system. Besides ignorance and/or stupidity of course.

Valve posted asking people to consider using the official Valve .deb package

Please, please, please, please not!
I'm raeding nearly every thread in the Steam for Linux forum, and we hear problems from people having used the downloadable deb for over a decade now! People should use what their distribution made of it, adding their dependencies and such. I cannot believe Valve proposes to actually use that!

What problems? I have been using the official .deb for over a year and it has worked fine. It's not flawless but there are issues with the Flatpak version as well.

As said: dependencies. And I'm not promoting Flatpak either, I prefer the "native" package (deb or whatever your system uses) of your distribution. The distribution makers download the same deb you can download (so they'll hardly make it worse), and they can add to it what the distribution needs to run it. I'm not saying the Steam deb does not work at all, it just might miss dependencies. Of course, if you know what to do, you can install them manually.

People keep coming in the forum with "Steam does not work on Linux", and when you make them show the terminal output, it's missing (32 bit) libraries. And people post "Steam for Linux cannot use games on my hard drive", and when you dig into it, they're using Snap or Flatpak, didn't even know they do, and thus wouldn't know why Steam cannot access other drives.

I am thinking of a really compelling reason to containerize Steam and can't come up with one...

In addition to the points above, I really like the idea of being able to have a different Mesa stack than my regular workloads. I run Ubuntu 22.04 and value the stability for most things, but would like my games to have the benefit of all the recent work on the Mesa stack (and I mind less if they crash as a result). That is the default with the Steam snap, as I understand it:

https://snapcraft.io/blog/what-the-steam-snap-is-evolving

Since the Steam snap is isolated from the rest of the host OS, we now include the Oibaf PPA by default. This means your games will be able to take advantage of bleeding edge Mesa libraries without impacting the stability of your system or the overhead of adding the PPA and re-enabling after upgrading.

That is less of an issue for me now that I have a Steam Deck, though.

Valve posted asking people to consider using the official Valve .deb package

Please, please, please, please not!
I'm raeding nearly every thread in the Steam for Linux forum, and we hear problems from people having used the downloadable deb for over a decade now! People should use what their distribution made of it, adding their dependencies and such. I cannot believe Valve proposes to actually use that!

What problems? I have been using the official .deb for over a year and it has worked fine. It's not flawless but there are issues with the Flatpak version as well.

As said: dependencies. And I'm not promoting Flatpak either, I prefer the "native" package (deb or whatever your system uses) of your distribution. The distribution makers download the same deb you can download (so they'll hardly make it worse), and they can add to it what the distribution needs to run it. I'm not saying the Steam deb does not work at all, it just might miss dependencies. Of course, if you know what to do, you can install them manually.

People keep coming in the forum with "Steam does not work on Linux", and when you make them show the terminal output, it's missing (32 bit) libraries. And people post "Steam for Linux cannot use games on my hard drive", and when you dig into it, they're using Snap or Flatpak, didn't even know they do, and thus wouldn't know why Steam cannot access other drives.

What's almost never brought up is that if a user is using Ubuntu LTS, and the official Steam package then they can get support directly from Valve. They don't need to go forum hunting, pasting commands lines into their terminal that they have no idea what its doing etc. They can just contact the Steam support and get help from a real company. This alone should make Ubuntu the recommendation for all beginners who, judging by the numbers, are growing. But many active Linux forum users are so proud in their specific choice of distro, package format, display server etc. that they don't take this simple fact into account. I am not surprised Valve is getting bug reports for Steam Snap. I'm sure they get bug reports for Steam Flatpak and all the other packages as well. Heck I'm sure they get support cases for Hannah Montana Linux.

When I time and time again see posts like "Hi I am a Linux noob. What distro should I use" and the top response is Manjaro, I sigh and shake my head. It's no wonder Linux have a reputation for being complex. We don't ease new user in.


Last edited by Brokatt on 18 Jan 2024 at 10:58 am UTC

When I time and time again see posts like "Hi I am a Linux noob. What distro should I use" and the top response is Manjaro, I sigh and shake my head.

Right you are.

What's almost never brought up is that if a user is using Ubuntu LTS, and the official Steam package then they can get support directly from Valve. They don't need to go forum hunting, pasting commands lines into their terminal that they have no idea what its doing etc. They can just contact the Steam support and get help from a real company.

[The same day on the forums, by an Ubuntu user...]
I hate how there's basically no support for Steam on Linux. I filed a ticket asking for help and they told me to check log files in C:\ - absolutely useless.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/4038106081469257961/?ctp=3#c4130430927306703734

What's almost never brought up is that if a user is using Ubuntu LTS, and the official Steam package then they can get support directly from Valve.

I haven't had contact with valves support yet, but in general, i can't recall a SINGLE instance, where the (free) software support of ANY company was worth a dime. So i wouldn't take that as a big plus tbh...

I love open source software as much as anyone, but let's be real here. There are plenty of super serious bugs in OSS applications, too. Saying that anything proprietary is untrustworthy by design is a bit over the top. With your logic, you'd need to containerize EVERYTHING, and the result of this would be a a fairly unproductive and ineffective system. I get containerization for high-risk applications (yes, like the internet browser), but locking software from trustworthy vendors inside a container is a bit much on the paranoid side.

I agree that there are super serious bugs in OSS applications as well. And I don't think it's particularly over the top to say proprietary applications are inherently untrustworthy; but I don't think the word "untrustworthy" needs to be interpreted in a particularly severe manner. You don't know what it's doing, so if you can limit its scope without much trouble, you might as well do that. And containerizing it is really not much trouble at all; indeed, I do containerize pretty much everything. Every app running on my system aside from Konsole and Dolphin is a Flatpak. And the system feels great. I think there is this perception that when you containerize an app, you cripple its ability to do anything and impose a great deal of overhead, and that is simply not true at all.

Valve posted asking people to consider using the official Valve .deb package

Please, please, please, please not!
I'm reading nearly every thread in the Steam for Linux forum, and we hear problems from people having used the downloadable deb for over a decade now! People should use what their distribution made of it, adding their dependencies and such. I cannot believe Valve proposes to actually use that!

I just use the Debian version of the Steam package. Never have any issues with it at all.

Valve posted asking people to consider using the official Valve .deb package

Please, please, please, please not!
I'm reading nearly every thread in the Steam for Linux forum, and we hear problems from people having used the downloadable deb for over a decade now! People should use what their distribution made of it, adding their dependencies and such. I cannot believe Valve proposes to actually use that!

I just use the Debian version of the Steam package. Never have any issues with it at all.

The Debian repository package or Valve's deb? The former one is the one I'm recommending. Of course, the latter one works too, it just might need more manual "help".

I think I'm going to install it, finally, to get my own experience...

Valve officially only supports one distro and that is the latest Ubuntu LTS - with either Gnome or KDE desktop.

Source? Their initial run of SteamOS was debian based, and not Ubuntu based. They include some ubuntu name libraries, and that's about it.

I've literally been installing steam on all my debian systems since it was first added to the repos... about 14 years ago. Never had any issues with it at all. Ubuntu LTS itself only supports their modified gnome install, so there is that.

By the way, Debian's package is now called 'steam-installer' and you can install it with three commands.
 
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt update
sudo apt install steam-installer steam-devices
And guess what? The /usr/games/steam file is a script that downloads the very official debian Steam package and installs it.

Funny enough, the Arch version likely does the exact same thing. Which basically means it doesn't really matter what Valve officially supports, people will get it installed, and currently the correct way to get the right dependencies, etc is to NOT use the .deb from their website, but to use your package manager on whichever distribution you choose.

What problems? I have been using the official .deb for over a year and it has worked fine. It's not flawless but there are issues with the Flatpak version as well.

Probably dependency issues, which is at the heart of the infamous "Yes, do as I say," in the LTT Linux Challenge.

Steam Flatpak has its issues, but it gets people arriving to the "I can install the game, I can play the game," faster with less risk (assuming you're not having to deal with your secondary drives/partitions at least).

I want to address Linus' issues directly. 1) he should have read the warning. 2) PopOS is now on my shit list of distributions. I had it installed on some friend's laptops and it ate itself in the worse way. One of them was looking like it was having a hardware issue (both identical laptops). I installed Debian Bookworm over it... worked perfectly fine afterward. On the other one, it ran into a massive dependency hell, and all I was doing was running updates that hadn't been done in a few years, since the laptop basically was sitting idle as a backup. Never seen such a mess on a debian based system, and I've been running it for 25-ish years?

I've lost confidence in PopOS, unfortunately. It looked like a great alternative to Ubuntu until they decided to make their own DE.

Valve posted asking people to consider using the official Valve .deb package

Please, please, please, please not!
I'm reading nearly every thread in the Steam for Linux forum, and we hear problems from people having used the downloadable deb for over a decade now! People should use what their distribution made of it, adding their dependencies and such. I cannot believe Valve proposes to actually use that!

I just use the Debian version of the Steam package. Never have any issues with it at all.

The Debian repository package or Valve's deb? The former one is the one I'm recommending. Of course, the latter one works too, it just might need more manual "help".

I think I added details further up, but the Debian repository 'steam-installer' these days is just an installer script that does all the work of downloading Valve's deb for you :)

I am thinking of a really compelling reason to containerize Steam and can't come up with one...

newer driver, that why they packaged with snaps
newer lybraries too
also, it could be more secure, because the game is in a sandbox
but everything here is covered by flatpak, and it work better too, and it's ubuntu choice to have out-of-date drivers