We are not involved with the snap repackaging.
I would argue this is the most important sentence in this article.
Not really, usually Steam packages on distributions aren't maintained by Valve. The only exception are .debs from their website. Even the Steam flatpak is community maintained.
I've had no issues with steam on nixos/nixpkgs. Flatpak also had it's fair share of bugs and games not working because of flatpak and proton using bubblewrap for sandboxing. Snaps sandboxing might cause those issues too, so hopefully they'll be fixed at some point (or even better, Ubuntu switches to flatpak for desktop apps).
I know it’s because it’s horribly insecure, but it’s kinda funny that fucking winget of all things is one of the only package managers that install Steam without issue.
P.S. I’m a hybrid Windows/Linux user, pls don’t kill me
Edit: insecure and barely a package manager, but works roughly like one for an end user
How would I check which version I have installed? I just used Fedora software to install. I’ll have to check when I get home. Haven’t had issues, though, so probably not worth the trouble.
On Fedora you could do flatpak list --app to look whether Steam is installed as a flatpak. If not it's installed through dnf, but that can be tested by running dnf list installed | grep -i steam. You could also open Fedora Software and I believe in the top right is a button to select where a package should come from. There'd be the option to choose between flatpak or rpm. Another way to test is to open a terminal and type in steam. If Steam opens, it's a rpm, if the command is not available, it's a flatpak (you'd need to use flatpak run com.valvesoftware.Steam, iirc).
Packaging software is usually not that difficult, especially if it's already packaged in another packaging format. E.g. .deb and .rpm put the same files in similar places, the difference is mainly how It's specified where a file goes. Because Snap and flatpak are providing a sandbox, complex software like Steam can behaves unexpectedly (fixed a few years ago for flatpak).
tl;dr
You're right, it's not worth the effort. Both rpm and flatpak should work flawlessly. If multiple games actually have issues running trying out a different package might help, but I didn't have issues for many years, so you probably won't either.
Awesome, thanks for the info!
This time they said if you don't want the deb to use flatpak.
Actually it's Valves responsibility to tell the snap packager to kindly fuck off and don't fuck this up for us.
Ive only had issues with the snap or Flatpack versions. At least the Flatpack one is open source.
Fwiw, the steam snap is open source
Of course. Because snaps fucking SUCK.
All my homies hate snaps.
most functional snap package
With the flatpak it barely even matters which distro you use. Flatpak steam & mesa and go play some games. I game on Debian stable now.
I been moving my systems to Debian stable, thanks to flatpak and backports.
Why they don't take over the work and make it official with support is beyond me though.
The flatpak version hammers my DNS-server when downloading it isn't funny anymore, 100s requests a minute for the same domains, it ignores the TTL too.
I think they also use the flatpak version on Steamdeck? Really weird.
I tried to install steam on Ubuntu 22.04 and I just see the snap version. Is it true that we cannot run sudo apt install steam anymore?
The day they started pushing snaps into APT and making it a pain to choose the non-snap version... I left Ubuntu. If I wanted to install the snap I would've used snap install not apt install
Yeah before I use Ubuntu. my first exposure on Linux is Linux Mint and it seems Linux Mint support secure boot atm. if this gets worst. I will go back to linux Mint again
Linux Mint is just Ubuntu but with no snaps and better optimized for desktop (as opposed to server) use
Use the flatpak
Sorry I found it this is the best sudo add-apt-repository multiverse sudo apt install steam
valve always recommends native deb and my experience with deb is flawless so far
Gaming on the GNU/Linux operating system.
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