While there's a huge focus on Flatpak and Flathub thanks to the Steam Deck shipping with it out of the box, Canonical on the other hand continue with their own Snap packaging and they have a Steam Snap in testing for Ubuntu (and other distros, since Snap also works elsewhere).
In a fresh introduction post on the Ubuntu Linux Discourse forum (thanks OMGUbuntu), it outlines how they're now actually "going all in on the gaming experience on Ubuntu and we’ve started building out a team dedicated to working on just that". Part of that is reducing the need for PPAs and other solutions, and their focus now is on Steam.
The call for testing has now begun on their Steam Snap package which gives you everything you need for Native Linux gaming and for Proton too. It's early days for the Steam Snap so expect issues but they said they will "iterate quickly, and respond to this feedback" on it.
On top of that we can expect more gaming on Ubuntu Linux improvements to come "such as providing easy ways to get more bleeding edge components like Mesa drivers, and even newer kernels and proprietary drivers" — that all sounds great to me.
It's not actually live yet but once it will be, I'll update the post here with instructions they give, which they will also post in the link above. Update: Canonical has now done an additional blog post, going over the instructions. Either install it from the website / Snap Store or via terminal: snap install steam --beta
With the blog post, Canonical once again reiterated their plan to improve Ubuntu gaming mentioning that "the Ubuntu Desktop team is getting down to work planning for the future, and improving the gaming experience features heavily in our priorities (and hiring plan!)". They go on to mention how "serious gamers" continue using Windows primarily, which we all know as Steam puts Linux at about 1% currently (see our Steam Tracker) but they hope by "improving the gaming experience, and the Steam experience in particular, we can ensure that Ubuntu can become a genuine daily driver for gamers".
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
RichardYao Apr 29, 2022
Quoting: damarrinI'd be happier with snaps if at least they started faster. 10 secs for FF from an NVMe drive, 40 seconds from a spinning drive in a recent Ubunt is a joke.
The downside of duplicating shared libraries is that it does not take advantage of the system page cache (or ARC for ZFS), so load times are higher. :/
Quoting: SchattenspiegelRemember the time basically every major application had a .deb package available and most the disk space was available for games and data and stuff, because applications where small and started nearly instantly and... actually...worked...?There is no goal, it's just laziness and illiteracy of developers, who for the most part don't know how to write pure code, they have flooded Linux devcommunity.
I mean seriously, what is the goal of this? To accelerate climate change by being intentionally wasteful? To incite social unrest by creating an atmosphere comparable to a traffic jam whenever one opens an application?
At the same time, all these snaps/flatpaks etc (shhh, systemd) are complicated and unsafe, although it is useful for someone to have legitimate backdoors.
Welcome to World with New order created by corporations and approved by new Linux generation.
Last edited by jp on 29 April 2022 at 7:24 pm UTC
Quoting: SchattenspiegelRemember the time basically every major application had a .deb package available and most the disk space was available for games and data and stuff, because applications where small and started nearly instantly and... actually...worked...?
Probably those days, when games occupied megabytes. Not 50+ gigabytes. I agree that for small applications the overhead of flatpaks or snaps is sometimes ginormous - OTOH something like KiCad is huge already and the flatpak overhead is no longer relevant, same goes for the blender snap.
Few years ago a fair bunch of my proprietary/commercial software came as archives - compared to that appimages and snaps are a blessing.
Quoting: jpThere is no goal, it's just laziness and illiteracy of developers, who for the most part don't know how to write pure code, they have flooded Linux devcommunity.
And you are...? You have to be some serious developer for such... bold statements.
Quoting: jpAt the same time, all these snaps/flatpaks etc (shhh, systemd) are complicated and unsafe, although it is useful for someone to have legitimate backdoors.
Welcome to World with New order created by corporations and approved by new Linux generation.
Care to elaborate? We are really short on conspiracy theories round here.
Quoting: BreizhQuoting: scaineThat's a great turnaround from a few years ago, when the threatened removal of 32-bit libraries would have crippled the O/S from a gaming perspective.
A better gaming experience in what is still an incredibly popular "entry" distro is superb news.
When was it? Even Arch, who was one of the first distro to drop 32-bits support, still have 32-bits libraries (but in a repository that have to be activated explicitly), and is really good for gaming (well, even Valve is using it for SteamOS…).
About 3 years ago. https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/06/ubuntu-is-dropping-all-32-bit-support-going-forward
Valve itself might be less of an issue, but the games themselves rely on 32 bit support.
Last edited by seven on 29 April 2022 at 8:02 pm UTC
Steam Snap.
Pick one.
ElectricPrism Apr 29, 2022
On the one hand Ubuntu is * shivers * adequate for noobs. On the other hand Canonical has a LONG history of devoting huge amounts of energy into things against the grain of the FOSS community only to abandon it later.
Canonical are SerialAbandoners™
Canonical MissedTheSteamBoat™
Steam has been on Linux for nearly 10 years now. Canonical giving gamedevs & Valve the finger over the 32-bit thing a while ago and Canonical's business relationship with Microsoft making WSL & WSL2 just makes me not trust them as they are a Microsoft-shill proxy.
Money is one thing, I give money to hundreds of Linux Game Devs, but Microsoft has decades of history, and it's in their interest to inhibit Linux Gaming growth in favor of promoting Xbox and Windows 11. Why would they shoot themselves in the balls & bank when they could just sabotage other platforms through a existing business partner?
Despite what people say about Microsoft being a "Service Company" (SaaS) lately, they still are very much interested in enhancing their Quarterly Earnings and bottom line to please their stock owners and enhancing their Power & central importance in the world of computing -- that will never change.
All of their recent company purchases achieve those enhancements (1) GitHub (2) MineCraft (3) BlizzardActivision etc...
Last edited by ElectricPrism on 29 April 2022 at 11:03 pm UTC
UnixOutlaw Apr 30, 2022
Recently had a heap of dramas trying to get Alderon Game Launcher to "launch" as both Snap and AppImage - on Fedora 35 (I might wait a few updates before going to Fedora 36).
Finally managed to get the AppImage one to run by simply adding "--no-sandbox"... Goodbye SNAP!
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