Canonical's Steam Snap is Causing Headaches for Valve - OMG! Ubuntu
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Canonical may be ramping up its efforts to improve the Ubuntu gaming experience — yasss — but it seems their Steam snap package is causing a few headaches

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.

  • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
    1161·
    10 months ago

    I don’t even want to hate on Snap, I just think Flatpak is probably superior in almost every way and it’s probably not great that there are three competing formats for “applications with dependencies included”. It was supposed to be “package your app to this format, dear developer, so everyone can use it no matter the distro they use”, now it’s a bit more complicated. Frustrating, as this means developers without that many resources will only offer some formats and whichever you (or your distro) prefers might not be available.

    I know that you can get every format to work on every distro (AppImages are just single binaries you can execute), but each has their own first class citizen.

    By the way, the unofficial Steam Flatpak has been working well for me under Fedora 39 KDE Spin, but an official one would be great to have.

    • Kairos
      414·
      10 months ago

      Snap isn’t a standard actually. It’s closed off.

      • bjorney@lemmy.ca
        944·
        10 months ago

        Every line of snap code that touches your computer is open source, so “closed off” is absolute hyperbole when you are discussing the format

        • ZephrC@lemm.ee
          613·
          10 months ago

          Canonical specifically went out of their way to create a closed ecosystem with snaps, and you think that’s not “closed off” because they only allow you to download the open source parts of the snap software?

          • bjorney@lemmy.ca
            1140·
            10 months ago

            Which is why I phrased my above comment in the very precise and deliberate way I did.

            You don’t need to interface with canonical’s server to use snaps, you only need to do so if you want snaps that have been approved by and signed by canonical. Anyone can create a snap and privately distribute and install it, and every part of that process is open source.

            • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
              514·
              10 months ago

              Yeah, but nobody cares about your technical “gotcha.”

              • bjorney@lemmy.ca
                1031·
                10 months ago

                APK isn’t a closed source format just because Google operates the main store.

                If there was community effort someone could spin up their own snap store, this person did it https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/lol-an-open-source-snap-server-implementation/27109 - problem is, it would serve no benefit because you would have to create your own signing authority and patch snapd to use those assertions instead - and then you are still relying on a central authority to vet and sign releases and frankly I would rather have my software signed by canonical than someone random guy operating their own snap store

                • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  452·
                  10 months ago

                  Again: nobody cares because practically speaking, the only people using snaps are getting them from Ubuntu, and Ubuntu pushing snaps as the default is the only reason they aren’t using flatpaks intead.

            • bamboo@lemm.ee
              14·
              10 months ago

              Interestingly though unless it has changed recently, you can’t add a third party snap repository. Canonical’s is hard coded, and when people requested alternate repo support, the issue was closed with a response that users seeking third party repos could just edit the string and recompile. Not the most useful solution

    • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.com
      271·
      10 months ago

      I didnt want to hate snap either, until I found out its proprietary technology… on a foss OS… since then I‘m pretty over it - and ubuntu for that matter. I‘ll probably switch to debian once ubuntu 23.10 runs out of support.

      • ★ 𝐑𝐮𝐢𝐤𝐤𝐚𝐚𝐏𝐫𝐮𝐬 ★@lemmy.ml
        1·
        10 months ago

        Well… Flatpak ships Propietary Software too. And at this point Propietary Software is almost avoidable (unless you have a LibreBoot. I want one too). But it’s reasonable to be frustrated that an operating system as influential as Ubuntu has ended up falling so down in its technology, and that it has the support of a company like Chanonical.

        Edit: Thank you for the comments. I didn’t noticed Snap itself is propietary.

        • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.com
          9·
          10 months ago

          Not sure if I understand you correctly. Flatpak itself is not proprietary afaik and while people might make flatpaks of proprietary software, the problem with snap is that the snap system itself is proprietary afaik.

          So every open source software packaged in snap gets this proprietary stain added to it. Thats what actually bothers me.

        • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
          6·
          10 months ago

          There’s a misunderstanding here. What we mean is that the Snap system itself is proprietary. The server side is proprietary and there’s no way to add repos other than Canonical’s.

          Flatpak is open, and anybody can create/add a remote.

          Both can be used to package and distribute proprietary software. But the same could be said of .deb or .rpm

        • arthur@lemmy.zipEnglish
          3·
          10 months ago

          I think they meant that the Snap itself (or part of it) is proprietary. But I’m not sure.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
      16·
      10 months ago

      Personally, I don’t get why devs would elect to package for Snap, in favor of Flatpak or AppImage. I guess, if your toolchain offers Snap packaging out of the box, then might as well. But aside from that, do you not just reach fewer users…?

      • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
        93·
        10 months ago

        Yes and no. Last time I checked, Ubuntu was the most used desktop Linux OS, and it obviously uses Snap (and has Flatpak disabled by default).

          • bjorney@lemmy.ca
            91·
            10 months ago

            They didn’t “disable the format”

            From your own link:

            Do keep in mind that “not installed by default” is not the same as “not available to install at all”. To this end, Flatpak continues to be available in the Ubuntu repos, and users of Ubuntu flavors are free to install Flatpak

            • Ephera@lemmy.ml
              61·
              10 months ago

              Well, yeah, you can enable it. But if it’s not active in their GUI software store by default, then many users will not find / look for it. It’s rather important for a package format that you don’t have to separately install it.

              • bjorney@lemmy.ca
                21·
                10 months ago

                Why do you need to have two package formats that do the same thing installed by default? If you could install snaps and flatpaks both from the same store you could have 2 (or 3 if you also installed the .deb) copies of the same app, like steam etc installed, and user sessions and games set up on one wouldn’t be launchable from the other because they all store their state and config in different locations - the only way to know what config your program is launching with would be to inspect and rename the launcher scripts. If you are intending to support naive users this is the absolute worst case scenario. It would be like debian including pacman by default as well alongside apt for maximum user accessibility confusion.

                • Ephera@lemmy.ml
                  61·
                  10 months ago

                  Because many apps will (or would prefer to) only be bundled as Flatpak. I agree that the deduplication is not a trivial problem to solve, even if they might have already solved it for DEBs (I don’t know).

                  But your entire comment could just as well be a rant why Canonical shouldn’t have introduced Snaps in the first place. It might be good for their bank account, if they can somehow monetize part of the cake, but splitting the cake even further, after it’s already split into DEB, RPM, AppImage, Flatpak, Docker, APK etc., that’s maximum user confusion.

                  • bjorney@lemmy.ca
                    2·
                    10 months ago

                    Because many apps will (or would prefer to) only be bundled as Flatpak.

                    This reads like speculation to me and is directly contrary to the file counts on flathub and snapcraft. What about CLI apps and server software? How are they supposed to distribute their software if not via snap? (Flatpak doesn’t support this well)

                    could just as well be a rant why Canonical shouldn’t have introduced Snaps in the first place

                    You are acting like Ubuntu core (and snaps) came after flatpak? Snaps were announced almost a decade ago

                    Like, I get you don’t like snaps, but your argument is basically “every Linux distribution should ship the same default software, and it should be the software I choose”

          • Vincent@feddit.nl
            3·
            10 months ago

            Ubuntu itself never natively came with Flatpak though. Some flavours might have, but their marketshare is also a lot smaller.

            Of course, if Ubuntu ever decided to ship with Flatpak natively, that would instantly become the obvious choice.

        • iopq@lemmy.world
          54·
          10 months ago

          How do you figure? For example, Arch Linux community on r*ddit is bigger than the Ubuntu one

          Where did you get the numbers?

          • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
            6·
            10 months ago

            Hard to find raw numbers backed by good sources.

            If you filter the Steam Hardware Survey for December 2023 by Linux, you can see Arch has a market share of 7.85% (excluding SteamOS on the Deck, which is technically based on Arch and has 40.53%) while Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS - a specific Ubuntu version - already has 7.04% on its own.

            But that’s also just Steam users. Ubuntu is one of the few Linux distributions that OEMs ship preinstalled and officially support on some of their devices (Dell for example). Another example is Fedora iirc, which Lenovo ships or at least used to ship as an option on some of their ThinkPad notebooks.

            I’d assume the Arch community on Reddit is bigger than the Ubuntu community as it’s geared towards tech-savvy people. Going by Reddit community size wouldn’t make much sense though. Even if you add up the member count of the r/windows, r/windows10 and r/windows11 community (which doesn’t make a lot of sense as most users are probably not unique), it’s only like 3-4x the members of r/archlinux, which doesn’t translate to market share whatsoever.

            I don’t really have hard numbers, sorry. Should’ve checked first. I guess I just assumed because of the OEM support and being relatively easy to install and maintain for the average guy (in comparison) that it was the leading Linux desktop distro in terms of marketshare. I’m still assuming this is the case for the reasons stated, but can’t tell you with 100% certainty.

            • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
              8·
              10 months ago

              I don’t really have hard numbers, sorry.

              It’s impossible to measure since sharing copyleft stuff can’t be tracked like sales of proprietary software can. There’s no need to apologize about not doing the impossible.

            • iopq@lemmy.world
              31·
              10 months ago

              Well, most of windows users don’t even know they are using it, they think they are using a “PC” as opposed to Mac

              Any Linux desktop user is already very tech savvy, I doubt there are any Ubuntu users that don’t know they are using Ubuntu so the windows commission is not apt

          • Ephera@lemmy.ml
            41·
            10 months ago

            If you’re on Ubuntu, you can just ask your question in the normal Linux community or in a search engine. You don’t need to go to a special Ubuntu community.

            That’s at least, how it makes sense to me. In general, I’ve seen many niche distros have very active communities, because everyone just ruts together and helps each other out.

            …which is to say, I don’t think there are accurate marketshare statistics, because no telemetry, but my impression is also that Ubuntu is still popular out in the wild.

          • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
            2·
            10 months ago

            So? The AMD subreddit is larger than either Nvidia’s or Intel’s (in the case of Intel, by a lot). Both of them have a greater market share than AMD in their respective markets.

            Porsche has over double the subs of Toyota, yet Toyota sells 33x the amount of cars.

            Subs means zero.

            • iopq@lemmy.world
              1·
              10 months ago

              Again, my mom is not on the Intel subreddit because she doesn’t know she has an Intel processor. In fact, she used to work for Intel, and she still doesn’t care

              Ubuntu is nowhere near popular enough to be a default. I’m just wondering how to count the market share accurately

    • NekkoDroid@programming.dev
      11·
      10 months ago

      The thing with AppImages is: it requires FUSE2 which doesn’t really get packaged/included by default anymore in a lot of places and the recommendation is “build on the most old and crusty distro you want to support” which just sounds like a nightmare in multiple ways :)

      And with snaps the sandboxing only really works on Ubuntu and nowhere else last time I looked into it (then there is also the entire problem if you want to host your own repository/“storefront”).

      So really the only universal sandboxing method that effectivly makes sense is Flatpak.

    • Lichtblitz@discuss.tchncs.de
      7·
      10 months ago

      Flatpak with Fedora 39 must have come a long way. Almost every tutorial with workarounds or discussion of broken features you can find online is now obsolete. It just works out of the box, especially under KDE. Mostly. That makes searching for actual issues extremely hard because I find myself chasing down paths of issues that have long been resolved.

      • unalivejoy@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        Agreed. the only “workarounds” I’ve needed to do (on arch) is install gtk-desktop-portal-{gtk,kde} because it’s not included with kde-plasma5 for some reason.

    • MonkderZweite@feddit.ch
      3·
      10 months ago

      and it’s probably not great that there are three competing formats for “applications with dependencies included”.

      Ok in snap/flatpak but i tink that’s a bit unfair in appimage. First two are runtimes, second is a file format that does stuff with fuse. That’s like saying there should only be one I/O scheduler.

      now it’s a bit more complicated

      Do native for system/environment stuff and simple projects, flatpak for frontend molochs with lots of dependencies, no?

      • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
        4·
        10 months ago

        I don’t think AppImage is a bad technology, but with the comparatively minuscule marketshare Linux desktop has barely any developer/software company can invest the resources to test and maintain packages in all these formats. It’s often not worth it for commercial software to offer packages in every possible format (yeah, yeah, open source is great, I know; still, commercial software is real and many people (need to) rely on it).

        I’ve been using Fedora for a couple of weeks (one of my New Year’s Resolutions is to completely ditch Windows, so my main computer is now on Fedora :D) and most of the software I use is either available in the official repositories, as an rpm or a Flatpak. But there’s the odd piece of software where I can only find AppImage or Snap versions, and often if a Flatpak is available, it’s non-official (Steam for example).

        So, you potentially have packages from the package manager (mostly deb- or rpm-based, and whatever format Arch uses), then you have AppImage, Snap and Flatpak and some applications are simply an archive with an executable binary. That’s a far cry from installing everything from one or two places, which I feel like used for be one of the selling points for Linux (years ago).

        Nothing most users can’t handle, but it could certainly be more streamlined. Now before I install software, I check the website, then I check whether they offer an official flatpak or an rpm package if it’s not in the official Fedora repositories, and if they don’t, I check if there’s an unofficial one on Flathub, which sometimes has implications. If there’s no Flatpak whatsoever, I fall back to standalone binaries/archives when available. It’s probably easier to install software on Windows now: download the installer from the official website, install it and done. Most software auto-updates itself.

        Having options is great and one of the great things about OSS, but I feel like when it comes to “standards” like these, more collaboration instead of reinventing the wheel over and over again would be better.

        • drndramrndra@lemmygrad.ml
          2·
          10 months ago

          That’s a far cry from installing everything from one or two places, which I feel like used for be one of the selling points for Linux (years ago).

          That’s because years ago you had a choice between using the repo or compiling the package yourself.

          Now before I install software, I check the website, then I check whether they offer an official flatpak or an rpm package if it’s not in the official Fedora repositories, and if they don’t, I check if there’s an unofficial one on Flathub, which sometimes has implications.

          Imagine if Fedora came with software specifically made to install and update software from all of those different sources through a simple and unified gui. That would really streamline that whole ordeal. It could even include a snap backend for masochists.

          PS

          Wait till you learn about nix and guix

          Having options is great and one of the great things about OSS, but I feel like when it comes to “standards” like these, more collaboration instead of reinventing the wheel over and over again would be better.

          obligatory xkcd

          • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
            1·
            10 months ago

            The “Discover” app from KDE and the “Software” app from GNOME actually support backend plugins, but it’s far from ideal. I had an issue where a Flatpak (Tor Launcher) showed up in Discover with an update available, but when trying to update it would fail silently and show up as an update again. Updating via CLI revealed that the package was deprecated in favor of another one and it asked whether I wanted to replace it.

            Even if it’d work great, it wouldn’t really solve the issue that developers have to try and package their app in many different formats because not all distributions support all formats (out of the box). There isn’t a clear “release in this format” for developers. And as I said, unofficial packages aren’t ideal.

            • drndramrndra@lemmygrad.ml
              1·
              10 months ago

              Refer to the xkcd. There’s never going to be a single universal standard to unite them all and in light bind them. The best you’re going to get is improved support and integration.

    • Dandroid@dandroid.app
      2·
      10 months ago

      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.

        • Dandroid@dandroid.app
          2·
          10 months ago

          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.

          • UnsavoryMollusk@lemmy.world
            2·
            10 months ago

            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!

            • Dandroid@dandroid.app
              1·
              10 months ago

              If no one else has this issue, it could very well be something unique to my internet connection!

          • PlexSheep@feddit.de
            1·
            10 months ago

            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.

            • Dandroid@dandroid.app
              1·
              10 months ago

              How are you closing the program? I don’t mean with the X button on the desktop environment. I mean command line programs.

                • Dandroid@dandroid.app
                  1·
                  10 months ago

                  I’m sorry, I must have responded to the wrong comment. That comment was supposed to be in an entirely different conversation.

                  Edit: Oh, I just reviewed my inbox. I thought you replied to a different comment of mine. I’m so dumb. Carry on.

                  • PlexSheep@feddit.de
                    2·
                    10 months ago

                    Everything alright. We all have some days where just nothing seems to be working right and we make stupid mistakes.

                    Just this Monday was one for me, even reported an issue to the Ubuntu trackers and upstream, turned out I just had a typo in both my code and minimal working examples.

                    No biggie at the end of the day.

    • firecat@kbin.social
      925·
      10 months ago

      Just tell the billion dollar company to allow people to download the games on their browser. The Client only exists as a means to DRM and analytics, there’s no actual reason for games not to become standalone.

      • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
        292·
        7 months ago

        That’s pretty unfair. Before Valve’s efforts, the first thing we PC gamers asked eachother about a new game was always “could you get it running?”

        Three bad old days were quite bad, and they started getting better in lock step with Valve’s improvements to Steam.

        Correlation/causation and all that. But for a lot of us Valve earned a lot of goodwill simply by allowing “request a refund” on games that run poorly. (Edit: which was apparently forced on Valve by a government. Valve got lucky there!)

        • AlteredStateBlob@kbin.social
          141·
          10 months ago

          Their refund policy is due to getting slapped around in EU courts, not because valve is benevolent or anything. I do like steam a lot, but it is a near monopoly which acts as DRM to a degree. They did and would abuse that power unless regulated.

            • AlteredStateBlob@kbin.social
              6·
              10 months ago

              You’re correct, Australia played a big role in it, and the EU was passing regulation around 2015 on that issue as well. So they got slapped around in Australia and changed it up before getting slapped around in the EU.

        • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
          21·
          10 months ago

          A lot of people these days have no idea what has happened outside of the few years they’ve been in contact with the industry. Computing might as well have started in 2005 when you listen to them.

        • firecat@kbin.social
          25·
          10 months ago

          As someone who was during those times, your Zgen knowledge is very incorrect. The games did work, including Crisis (original). As to why the myth you hear from fellow Zgen gamers; it’s because graphics cards were invented. Brand new, no one knew what they were doing with them. The companys Renzen and Nvidia started sponsoring games, it’s how they became popular, their logos were part of the game, Metal Gear Solid revengeance is proof of this.

          Steam had no part in gaming history, they were not the first online platform. Dell made wild target before Valve Corporation was founded. Lootbox was invented before Steam launched it, Yahoo games (anyone remember them) in japan had the concept down to almost todays standards. Valve had nothing to do with gaming history, they are just known for their lawsuits and anti competitive behavior.