Canonical's Steam Snap is Causing Headaches for Valve - OMG! Ubuntu
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Canonical may be ramping up its efforts to improve the Ubuntu gaming experience — yasss — but it seems their Steam snap package is causing a few headaches

Timothée Besset, a software engineer who works on the Steam client for Valve, took to Mastodon this week to reveal: “Valve is seeing an increasing number of bug reports for issues caused by Canonical’s repackaging of the Steam client through snap”.

“We are not involved with the snap repackaging. It has a lot of issues”, Besset adds, noting that “the best way to install Steam on Debian and derivative operating systems is to […] use the official .deb”.

Those who don’t want to use the official Deb package are instead asked to ‘consider the Flatpak version’ — though like Canonical’s Steam snap the Steam Flatpak is also unofficial, and no directly supported by Valve.

  • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
    83·
    11 months ago

    Yes and no. Last time I checked, Ubuntu was the most used desktop Linux OS, and it obviously uses Snap (and has Flatpak disabled by default).

      • bjorney@lemmy.ca
        81·
        11 months ago

        They didn’t “disable the format”

        From your own link:

        Do keep in mind that “not installed by default” is not the same as “not available to install at all”. To this end, Flatpak continues to be available in the Ubuntu repos, and users of Ubuntu flavors are free to install Flatpak

        • Ephera@lemmy.ml
          61·
          11 months ago

          Well, yeah, you can enable it. But if it’s not active in their GUI software store by default, then many users will not find / look for it. It’s rather important for a package format that you don’t have to separately install it.

          • bjorney@lemmy.ca
            11·
            11 months ago

            Why do you need to have two package formats that do the same thing installed by default? If you could install snaps and flatpaks both from the same store you could have 2 (or 3 if you also installed the .deb) copies of the same app, like steam etc installed, and user sessions and games set up on one wouldn’t be launchable from the other because they all store their state and config in different locations - the only way to know what config your program is launching with would be to inspect and rename the launcher scripts. If you are intending to support naive users this is the absolute worst case scenario. It would be like debian including pacman by default as well alongside apt for maximum user accessibility confusion.

            • Ephera@lemmy.ml
              61·
              11 months ago

              Because many apps will (or would prefer to) only be bundled as Flatpak. I agree that the deduplication is not a trivial problem to solve, even if they might have already solved it for DEBs (I don’t know).

              But your entire comment could just as well be a rant why Canonical shouldn’t have introduced Snaps in the first place. It might be good for their bank account, if they can somehow monetize part of the cake, but splitting the cake even further, after it’s already split into DEB, RPM, AppImage, Flatpak, Docker, APK etc., that’s maximum user confusion.

              • bjorney@lemmy.ca
                2·
                11 months ago

                Because many apps will (or would prefer to) only be bundled as Flatpak.

                This reads like speculation to me and is directly contrary to the file counts on flathub and snapcraft. What about CLI apps and server software? How are they supposed to distribute their software if not via snap? (Flatpak doesn’t support this well)

                could just as well be a rant why Canonical shouldn’t have introduced Snaps in the first place

                You are acting like Ubuntu core (and snaps) came after flatpak? Snaps were announced almost a decade ago

                Like, I get you don’t like snaps, but your argument is basically “every Linux distribution should ship the same default software, and it should be the software I choose”

                • Ephera@lemmy.ml
                  2·
                  11 months ago

                  I don’t know why you’re trying to interpret all kinds of things into my comment. I did not say any of that. This isn’t some competition to show who’s technically more correct.

    • iopq@lemmy.world
      54·
      11 months ago

      How do you figure? For example, Arch Linux community on r*ddit is bigger than the Ubuntu one

      Where did you get the numbers?

      • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
        6·
        11 months ago

        Hard to find raw numbers backed by good sources.

        If you filter the Steam Hardware Survey for December 2023 by Linux, you can see Arch has a market share of 7.85% (excluding SteamOS on the Deck, which is technically based on Arch and has 40.53%) while Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS - a specific Ubuntu version - already has 7.04% on its own.

        But that’s also just Steam users. Ubuntu is one of the few Linux distributions that OEMs ship preinstalled and officially support on some of their devices (Dell for example). Another example is Fedora iirc, which Lenovo ships or at least used to ship as an option on some of their ThinkPad notebooks.

        I’d assume the Arch community on Reddit is bigger than the Ubuntu community as it’s geared towards tech-savvy people. Going by Reddit community size wouldn’t make much sense though. Even if you add up the member count of the r/windows, r/windows10 and r/windows11 community (which doesn’t make a lot of sense as most users are probably not unique), it’s only like 3-4x the members of r/archlinux, which doesn’t translate to market share whatsoever.

        I don’t really have hard numbers, sorry. Should’ve checked first. I guess I just assumed because of the OEM support and being relatively easy to install and maintain for the average guy (in comparison) that it was the leading Linux desktop distro in terms of marketshare. I’m still assuming this is the case for the reasons stated, but can’t tell you with 100% certainty.

        • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
          8·
          11 months ago

          I don’t really have hard numbers, sorry.

          It’s impossible to measure since sharing copyleft stuff can’t be tracked like sales of proprietary software can. There’s no need to apologize about not doing the impossible.

        • iopq@lemmy.world
          31·
          11 months ago

          Well, most of windows users don’t even know they are using it, they think they are using a “PC” as opposed to Mac

          Any Linux desktop user is already very tech savvy, I doubt there are any Ubuntu users that don’t know they are using Ubuntu so the windows commission is not apt

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
        41·
        11 months ago

        If you’re on Ubuntu, you can just ask your question in the normal Linux community or in a search engine. You don’t need to go to a special Ubuntu community.

        That’s at least, how it makes sense to me. In general, I’ve seen many niche distros have very active communities, because everyone just ruts together and helps each other out.

        …which is to say, I don’t think there are accurate marketshare statistics, because no telemetry, but my impression is also that Ubuntu is still popular out in the wild.

      • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
        2·
        11 months ago

        So? The AMD subreddit is larger than either Nvidia’s or Intel’s (in the case of Intel, by a lot). Both of them have a greater market share than AMD in their respective markets.

        Porsche has over double the subs of Toyota, yet Toyota sells 33x the amount of cars.

        Subs means zero.

        • iopq@lemmy.world
          1·
          11 months ago

          Again, my mom is not on the Intel subreddit because she doesn’t know she has an Intel processor. In fact, she used to work for Intel, and she still doesn’t care

          Ubuntu is nowhere near popular enough to be a default. I’m just wondering how to count the market share accurately