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.
Would be cool if they just straight up supported flatpaks. That’s been my main way of gaming for a couple years now, and it works great. The downside is that the folder structure is confusing so it makes things like modding pretty difficult.
or, you know, you can use your distro packages
Steam’s runtime is already sandbox-ception. Flatpak might be more appealing to Valve than it seems.
I see no value in switching from current situation (in-repo deb pkg + steam autoupdates) to flat/snap/farts, which I don’t use at all…
It’s not about you, it’s about what’s easier for Valve. If Valve is fine packaging, and getting bug reports, from all the different distributions, they’ll keep doing things as is. But as a Linux app developer myself, I exclusively publish to Flatpak because it guarantees everyone has the same system.
you’re at best uninformed about how the process actually works and what’s the role of a distro maintainer, a distro project, upstream authors. Not that every piece of software has enough value to be included in this process so maybe it will make sense to package your stuff by yourself.
or, you know, you could use a much better and consistent platform
I use debian, I’m happy and definitely have no idea what you are talking about :)
Debian is one of the distros where flatpaks are most appropriate lol, it’s the best way to not have programs that are really old
Adding weird third party repositories that can cause all kinds of issues probably isn’t the best idea
tbf, flatpaks are problematic shit noobs tend to appreciate because reasons. That said, beside the fact steam ships its own chroot, I’m a happy sid user and I don’t even have this imaginary problem of things being ‘very old’ sooo … but I can confirm you shouldn’t add weird third party repos or shitty flatpaks :)
It’s not just noobs that appreciate flatpak. Flatpak is good all-round.
And the problem of Debian packages being old is very much not imaginary lol. Debian has only just moved beyond Gnome 3.38/Plasma 5.20/kernel version 5.10.
That’s ancient. And that’s not to mention the other software repos, which are often updated at an even slower pace.
Don’t assume that just because you want extremely outdated packages, everyone else must want the same.
Maybe they’ll get there eventually, considering this is their method of choice for installing 3rd party apps on SteamOS 3.0.