Canonical 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.
  • aport@programming.dev
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • Contend6248@feddit.de
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      10 months ago

      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.

  • Montagge@kbin.social
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    10 months ago

    We are not involved with the snap repackaging.

    I would argue this is the most important sentence in this article.

    • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
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      10 months ago

      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).

      • pizzaboi@lemm.eeEnglish
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        9 months ago

        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.

        • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
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          9 months ago

          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.

    • cooopsspace@infosec.pubEnglish
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      10 months ago

      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.

    • firecat@kbin.social
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      10 months ago

      The article also is too favorable for Valve and doesn’t mention alternative methods. The billion dollar company should allow people to install games on their browsers. The client is nothing but an analytics and tracker. There’s no benefit, just like there’s no benefit in XBox or PS4/5 achievements or their features.

      • Tingly3771@beehaw.org
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        10 months ago

        You’re kidding right? The Steam client is overflowing with features, beyond the nice and simple mod manager, multiplayey systems for easy joining it also has a full featured discord alternative inside the chat system with voice and text chat and I think even screen sharing. To compare it to Xbox achievements is just insane for how much the steam client provides.

        • firecat@kbin.social
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          10 months ago

          XBox does the sane thing, why do you think it costs money to play multiplayer. Steam multiplayer isn’t even used because corporations have their own servers. The Client really is useless as it’s just a copy of XBox/PS+

      • macniel@feddit.de
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        10 months ago

        The billion dollar company should allow people to install games on their browsers

        How should that work?

      • ursakhiin@beehaw.org
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        10 months ago

        Why is it Valves responsibility to provide alternative install methods? If you genuinely believe it isn’t providing value just don’t use Steam to buy games if you don’t want to install using it.

  • ardi60@reddthat.comEnglish
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    10 months ago

    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?

    • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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      10 months ago

      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

      • ardi60@reddthat.com
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        10 months ago

        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

      • ardi60@reddthat.comEnglish
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        10 months ago

        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