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.
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Proprietary on the server/distribution end
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Controlled 100% by Canonical
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Worse performance, particularly in terms of app startup times
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Snaps are mounted as separate filesystems, so it can make things look cluttered in your file explorer or when you’re listing stuff with lsblk
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Canonical often forces users to use Snaps even when users have explicitly tried to install with apt. e.g. you run sudo apt install firefox and it installs a Snap
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It hasn’t gained traction with other distros like Flatpak has, and Canonical’s insistence on backing the “wrong” standard means Linux will continue to be more fragmented than it would be if they also went along with what has become the de facto standard
There are however benefits of snaps. It works for better for terminal programs, and Canonical can even package system stuff like the kernel as a snap - as you can imagine, this might be a very powerful tool when it comes to an immutable version of Ubuntu.
