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.
I feel the same. My entry distro was ubuntu, and every time I updated major version the whole installation exploded and i had to reinstall it from scratch.
Luckly for me now i use Debian and updating major release is smooth af. Already went through 3 major updates and 0 problems.
Just swap to Debian, Valve. And snap is engineered to waste your time, imo.
Isn’t SteamOS based on Debian, not Arch?
EDIT: nvm, it used to be Debian, but the newer versions for steamdeck are based on Arch.
As far as I know, SteamOS is already based on Debian. The dev is complaining about users trying to install steam on their own Ubuntu installs, not SteamOS.
EDIT: nvm, it used to be Debian, but the newer versions for steamdeck are based on Arch. Apparently they wanted rolling updates so that it would be easier to push out changes more frequently.
This is not an issue of what Distro Valve chose to use (SteamOS used Debian now it uses Arch) but is on Canonical for how they package it. I have just been dipping my toes into Linux lately and have been using Manjaro and Nobara and they have been working great for gaming and every day use… Until I play a game like Finals and have to swap to windows.
