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.
Snaps were designed to solve dependency hell, get modern software, security, among other issues. If it weren’t for the fact Flatpak does a better job, many more people would be praising Snap.
It’s good that Canonical is trying to make the desktop better. It would be better if they focused their efforts elsewhere.
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Flatpak is intended for end-user graphical applications, not many terminal applications are packaged by Flatpak so it makes sense why it wouldn’t show up. Snap IIRC was first intended for their embedded system.