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.

  • krellor
    160•5 months ago

    The article says that steam showing a notice on snap installs that it isn’t an official package and to report errors to snap would be extreme. But that seems pretty reasonable to me, especially since the small package doesn’t include that in its own description. Is there any reason why that would be considered extreme, in the face of higher than normal error rates with the package, and lack of appropriate package description?

    • KᑌᔕᕼIᗩEnglish
      94•5 months ago

      It’s not extreme. This is an opinion piece posted on OMGUbuntu, so I’ll let you figure out where their biases lie.

    • @teawrecks
      52•5 months ago

      Honestly, that seems like the nicest way to solve the problem. Afaik Valve would be fully within their rights to C&D them from unofficially rehosting their binaries. In any other situation, that would be a blatant security risk.

    • Ook the Librarian
      12•5 months ago

      Was an unextreme solution mentioned? I don’t see one. It seems very reasonable.

      What would more extreme, but not inappropriate, is for Valve to send a cease and desist to stop Canonical from using the Steam logo on a package Valve does not maintain. I don’t think that’s warranted. But calling a little text clarification “extreme” is nonsense.

      But Canonical using that logo is pretty misleading. I notice the thumbnail adds some Canonical-flare to the logo, but it’s not there on snapcraft.