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Canonical want help testing their Steam snap package for Ubuntu

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Do you game on Ubuntu or one of their flavours like Kubuntu or Xubuntu? Canonical want your help in further testing of the Steam snap. For anyone confused: there's many different types of packages on Linux. There's deb, rpm, flatpak, snap, appimage and more. Snap is what Canonical (who make Ubuntu) are rolling with.

Writing on their official Discourse forum, developer Ken VanDine mentioned they're hoping to have the snap of Steam out of Early Access soon and available to everyone.

In the post VanDine mentioned they've been "working feverishly to resolve issues and ensure it works well" and testing has been done across "the most popular Steam titles which should ‘just work’ based on reports on ProtonDB". But now they want more people to get involved to give their reports on how games work.

Details on how to get involved can be seen in the forum post.

The overall feeling you get from looking online is that snaps aren't particularly popular. However, is it just a case of a few people shouting above the rest? VanDine answered a few of my questions on that and more in an interview with GOL last year.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Misc, Steam, Ubuntu
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makergamer Mar 19, 2023
(for context: At home I use Mint, Manjaro, Postmarket/Alpine, and SteamOS (Deck). For $$, I'm an SA.)

I no longer trust anything from an Ubuntu "store" like offering.

Years ago, Canonical's Ubuntu had a Store where I purchased games (some from bundles, other games from their store on sale.) Then Canonical shut down the store saying, "We're sorry. So sorry." (just like BP in the South Park episode). As the saying goes: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

I won't go down the technical rabbit hole of my pro/con use-cases for Snap. But as a home consumer, I have more significantly more trust in Valve's official Flatpak than Canonical's [3rd party] attempts to repackage Steam for their users. BTW, Did Canonical need to get Valve's permission to do that? Just curious.

I am so very tired of AppStores. I see Flathub morphing into a FOSS "Itch.io" of sorts -- which more tolerable give the level or creator control. Even then, vendors can offer their own Flathub repo to for non-free & commercial stuff vs negotiating with Canonical to host a custom spun Snap.

Given Canonical's financial & other operational challenges over the last decade (more like two), they could really save some $$ & Cycles if flatpak as enabled out of the box. It would allow them to focus on where Snaps' use-cases really shine.
fenglengshun Mar 20, 2023
...am I the only one who felt "neat," and then just shrug?

Maybe because I'm starting to get used to using Flatpak, distrobox, Conty, and Nix that I'm just not fussy about how I get my apps. If app don't work with Flatpak, I find it on Nix, if it's not there, then I'll use Conty, distrobox, or AppImage, and if it really wants to be installed on root... then I'll just install it.

My only issue with snaps is the clutter, otherwise I'd probably use it as well. It's, like, whatever man. Just install your app and do what you need to do. People getting more access for Steam is nice, and Canonical's the one doing the work anyways, so, uh... neat. Have fun!
Appelsin Mar 20, 2023
Quoting: LinasI don't have anything against snaps as such, but the way Canonical are pushing them onto users feels disrespectful. Like if you apt install firefox, it will pull in snapd, and install the snap package of Firefox. Not quite what I expected the system to do.

A truly classic way of getting those people who initially don’t really care one way or the other to start caring in the wrong direction.

Anyway, I generally find that deb works best, but I’m always curious to test apps as either snap or Flatpak. Both are really interesting, but I usually end up with the deb version as the stayer installation.

E.g. when trying to handle profiles in Thunderbird under flatpak. It’s not straightforward to find the right directiry in which to pop your old profile directory.


Last edited by Appelsin on 20 March 2023 at 2:48 pm UTC
sarmad Mar 20, 2023
Quoting: SchattenspiegelSo, there is a working .deb of Steam provided by Valve and then Canonical decides, nah, that is working to well on our distribution, let's introduce additional points of failure by wrapping it into lot's of additional bubble wrap with our personal logo this totally open and free packaging standard that everyone could use if they went a little bit out of their way and accepted a few performance and efficiency regressions - on it an then ask the community - assuming said community can fit the 'improved' product's more ...chunky... dimensions into their existing gaming spaces and time schedules - to QA it because otherwise to big a task?

At first glance one might be tempted to ask: Why?
But then I remembered something that is easily forgotten these days: this is Linux! So if someone is doing to do some crazy and unnecessary Stuff - just because!- , you take a casual, fascinated glance at this marvel, offer a barely audible, but heartfelt 'Neat!' as commentary, and move on with your life.

Well, we don't actually have a .deb package. The .deb package is just the Steam installer, not Steam itself. When you run that .deb package you actually run the Steam installer which then installs/updates Steam for you and runs it. If the Snap package saves that step and makes the Steam installs and updates happen through Snap itself then that's a welcome move as that'll mean reducing the package formats on Ubuntu from three (deb, snap, and steam proprietary package) to two (deb, snap).
F.Ultra Mar 20, 2023
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Quoting: SchattenspiegelSo, there is a working .deb of Steam provided by Valve and then Canonical decides, nah, that is working to well on our distribution, let's introduce additional points of failure by wrapping it into lot's of additional bubble wrap with our personal logo this totally open and free packaging standard that everyone could use if they went a little bit out of their way and accepted a few performance and efficiency regressions - on it an then ask the community - assuming said community can fit the 'improved' product's more ...chunky... dimensions into their existing gaming spaces and time schedules - to QA it because otherwise to big a task?

At first glance one might be tempted to ask: Why?
But then I remembered something that is easily forgotten these days: this is Linux! So if someone is doing to do some crazy and unnecessary Stuff - just because!- , you take a casual, fascinated glance at this marvel, offer a barely audible, but heartfelt 'Neat!' as commentary, and move on with your life.

While I am among the crowd that hates containers with a passion I must say that _if_ there ever would be a use case for containers on a desktop then a browser and a games store would be it.

A browser because it is a major target and thus benefits much from being sand-boxed, also all browsers use heavily forked dependencies so they already have to bundle all their dependencies anyway making the practical difference between a container and a .deb

And a games store have all of the above _and_ also hosts closed source, so not trusted, applications combined with the fact that those applications (aka games) don't really have to interact with the rest of the system.

The supplied .deb from Valve is also nothing else than a small script that downloads the real steam package, so it is not a .deb containing the Steam application.
F.Ultra Mar 20, 2023
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Quoting: slaapliedjeI bet you if there could be alt stores to snap, no one would hate it as much as they do.

Well that is the situation today but people still hate it as much as they do. Now there AFAIK does not yet exist such a store, but there _could_ do since everything needed to build it is available, it's just that no one have bothered and that is hardly Canonical:s fault.
slaapliedje Mar 21, 2023
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: slaapliedjeI bet you if there could be alt stores to snap, no one would hate it as much as they do.

Well that is the situation today but people still hate it as much as they do. Now there AFAIK does not yet exist such a store, but there _could_ do since everything needed to build it is available, it's just that no one have bothered and that is hardly Canonical:s fault.
I'd like to be proven wrong, but I'm pretty sure their backend is tied very much into their client.
slaapliedje Mar 21, 2023
Quoting: TuxeeI know. Red Hat. With their NIH syndrome. Painful. They didn't want to contribute to upstart. They had to dish out systemd. How lame. They didn't want to support Unity, no they had to had it their way and concoct Gnome Shell. They could have supported Snap, but no, it had to be flatpak. Because all the Canonical alternatives preceded the Red Hat implementations. Mir was a different beast altogether - Canoncial actually wanted to use Wayland, but Wayland was years from being usable and then Mir served a different purpose.

Now I know this is a troll... but the only one of those that is accurate is upstart. Gnome Shell was around much longer than Ubuntu / Unity, in fact, Unity was a 'we don't like Gnome Shell, but are going to use the Gnome Libraries to make our own thing... that's really close to what Gnome Shell is anyhow' Literally upstart, which was a partial implementation of anything, and didn't cover a lot of use cases, is the only thing Ubuntu did really that wasn't in direct competition first. (By the way, Wayland is still a few years away from being truly usable, and Mir was ditched).

Quoting: TuxeeOh puhleeze. The usual BS. This has been the mantra for at least the last 15 years (because that's how long I use Linux on my desktop). The availability of commercial software has never been hindered by "having two or three package formats". Never. I do have my (paid-for) commercial products as DEBs, AppImages, Flatpaks, Tars, script installers. So if companies want to sell their stuff they are perfectly capable and willing to do so.

Yeah, and I've been using Linux for 25. And? Right, they are perfectly capable of doing it. But look at complaints from different developers... hell Valve switched SteamOS from Debian to Arch because some of them hated packaging things for Debian. I don't know about you, but I've talked to many developers over the years, and one of the things they've always hated about trying to create software for Linux is how many different installation methods are there.

Many years ago, you'd mostly see on forums things like 'if you don't know how to do ./configupre; make; make install, then you can GTFO'. I can guarantee you that there have been and will continue to be developers that don't want to deal with that crap, so simply don't release software for Linux.
TactikalKitty Mar 22, 2023
Snaps...Flatpacks, I'd rather use neither. Apps installed via Snaps or vice versa seem to load slower and are harder to remove from the system. For instance, I can't even uninstall Steam Snap. It fails everytime and the Software Center can't remove it either without error.
F.Ultra Mar 22, 2023
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Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: slaapliedjeI bet you if there could be alt stores to snap, no one would hate it as much as they do.

Well that is the situation today but people still hate it as much as they do. Now there AFAIK does not yet exist such a store, but there _could_ do since everything needed to build it is available, it's just that no one have bothered and that is hardly Canonical:s fault.
I'd like to be proven wrong, but I'm pretty sure their backend is tied very much into their client.

The URL to the store is most likely hardcoded in the source code of snapd, but the code is open so it can be forked and so far we don't know how Canonical would treat a patch that changes that to a config value under say /etc/snap.d/.
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