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I’m sure Canonical’s neverending death march towards Snap, along with the OS running outdated packages, is why Valve no longer uses Ubuntu for SteamOS development. The greatest April Fools was Ubuntu dropping Snaps because so many people were saying how they could go back to using Ubuntu again…then they noticed it was a joke and the sadness set in.
I was certain you had to be joking in this post, holy shit.
https://news.itsfoss.com/ubuntu-ditch-snap/
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That’s gotta be the funniest backfire for an April Fools’ joke I’ve seen in a while lmao
And still is, as Google still has it on the first page of results for “Ubuntu without snaps”.
Why do people hate snap over flatpak? I feel like I’ve read a thread or two about it, but I haven’t seen an answer that was particularly satisfying (almost definitely for a lack of trying on my part, to be clear).
Proprietary on the server/distribution end
Controlled 100% by Canonical
Worse performance, particularly in terms of app startup times
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
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
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.
Zoinks!
Snaps just act strange. They update in weird ways, it’s always automatic and it’s confusing how to keep something in a version that won’t auto update. It’s been a bad experience for me.
Snap startup times are awful, tens of seconds to open a simple text editor, even on an nvme ssd…
edit: Also it doesnt bother following XDG specifications, further cluttering our home folders.
(The only thing I really prefer Snap over Flatpak is that you need the whole package name in Flatpak (like com.valvesoftware.Steam for Steam) whilst you can simply use “steam” in snap but that’s due to decentralisation vs centralisation I guess and overall a minor problem for me)