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.
My only complaint about flatpak is that updating them fails like 50% of the time for seemingly no reason, and I just have to run the update command over and over until they are all updated.
It happens constantly both on my laptop (suse) and my Steam Deck (arch). Same exact behavior. I gave up trying to debug it, and I just keep retrying the update command until the list is empty.
I am honestly surprised, my arch desktop and my steam deck got no problems of those types. If you find what makes it happens on your systems then maybe it will help improve the tech!
I’ve never had anything like this when I used to run arch (with Archivstall). Also not on fedora for months and now back on LMDE.
