Canonical want help testing their Steam snap package for Ubuntu

Quoting: TuxeeCanonical makes money with support and services for commercial customers. Exactly like Red Hat. Their Steam efforts are just pursued to keep Ubuntu visible as "the" desktop distro that plays well with their customer services. And there is zero lock-in since pretty much every software I can think of is also available via other channels. Snap is a convenient (YMMV) alternative in the Ubuntu ecosystem. That's all.

That would be great if it were true, as some software is out there that make snaps available, but otherwise have to be installed via tar balls, or converting rpms, etc. It's a visibility issue. I bet you if there could be alt stores to snap, no one would hate it as much as they do. Ubuntu is like the Apple of the Linux world, or at least they'd like to be.

The difference between them and Red Hat is that Red Hat pays developers to put most of that code back into open source projects and pushes forth the advancement in Linux in ways that Ubuntu have either tried to do their own thing with (mir, Unity, snap) or just minor things that do actually help (gnome performance improvements). The scale difference of how much Red hat improves Linux as a whole vs how much Ubuntu does is kind of staggering.

For myself (and others), Ubuntu would need to do a lot to regain our trust. All the snap vs flatpak does is cause developers to keep shying away from deploying commercial software on Linux (and as much as we as users can disagree on how much we want commercial software, for 'The year of the Linux Desktop' to happen, we need it.

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: slaapliedjeEvery corporation has an agenda... to make money. Canonical's best way to make money is to try to get as much vendor lock-in that they can, without pissing off the community enough that someone switches to a different distro. Snap and them being the only ones who can host a snap store is their method of lock-in.

That's just nonsense. Canonical make zero money from desktop Ubuntu users. They make money, like Red Hat/IBM do, by offering paid support and services. Snaps make that hugely easier for their actual customers, and for themselves as maintainers. They might also have made money from the Ubuntu Phone, which snaps were largely created for, but they ran out of money before that could become a thing.

Snaps only come from one place to solve the discovery issue that PPAs have, and which Fedora users experience from flatpaks where they have access to some flatpaks but not all of them. All the snaps are available in one place - accessible by default for Ubuntu users and trivial to add for users of other distros (except Mint, who put up additional barriers in the way of user choice).

They've opened up their support stuff to desktop users, so them making zero money from that would kind of imply that was a bad decision, no?

I personally haven't seen other flatpak 'stores' outside of flathub, but it's still open, and vendors can put a link on their page to add theirs. Pretty simple. The problem with Canonical being the only ones who can curate the snap store is that they don't have the man power like Apple does to make sure malware doesn't slip in, like has already happened at one point.

Quoting: PikoloIf they do this, I'll have to change my mount points and backup procedures :(
I store my Steam games on a second drive. It's mounted on /opt, but in my experience snaps can't access stuff outside of /home unless installed in classic mode. I don't particularly want to change my mount to within /home - /home gets backed up, while the games shouldn't be

I use Deja Dup Backup, and it has in it's preferences the directories you don't want backed up.

Quoting: slaapliedjeThe scale difference of how much Red hat improves Linux as a whole vs how much Ubuntu does is kind of staggering.

Canonical revenue 2021: $93 million.
Red Hat revenue 2021: $5.6 billion.

Gee, I wonder why Red Hat may be able to do more than Canonical can.

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: TuxeeCanonical makes money with support and services for commercial customers. Exactly like Red Hat. Their Steam efforts are just pursued to keep Ubuntu visible as "the" desktop distro that plays well with their customer services. And there is zero lock-in since pretty much every software I can think of is also available via other channels. Snap is a convenient (YMMV) alternative in the Ubuntu ecosystem. That's all.

That would be great if it were true, as some software is out there that make snaps available, but otherwise have to be installed via tar balls, or converting rpms, etc. It's a visibility issue. I bet you if there could be alt stores to snap, no one would hate it as much as they do.

So... The situation without the Snap store would be exactly the same for non-snappers today. Correct?
Now, the alt stores... Yes, it would stifle your Canonical flaming somewhat (though I assume there is plenty of other nasty stuff lurking out there), but apart from that it wouldn't change a thing. How many alternative Flatpak repos are there? I have about 20 Flatpaks installed on my system (about as many as snaps). Exactly ONE is NOT from flathub. (And that's a paid-for software.)

Quoting: slaapliedjeThe difference between them and Red Hat is that Red Hat pays developers to put most of that code back into open source projects and pushes forth the advancement in Linux in ways that Ubuntu have either tried to do their own thing with (mir, Unity, snap) or just minor things that do actually help (gnome performance improvements). The scale difference of how much Red hat improves Linux as a whole vs how much Ubuntu does is kind of staggering.

I 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.

And just to give you an idea about size and influence: Red Hat has - according to Wikipedia - 19,000 employees and makes billions of revenue. Canonical has a few hundred employees and has an annual revenue of 140 millions. So yes, Red Hat contributing much much more is hardly surprising.

Quoting: slaapliedjeFor myself (and others), Ubuntu would need to do a lot to regain our trust. All the snap vs flatpak does is cause developers to keep shying away from deploying commercial software on Linux (and as much as we as users can disagree on how much we want commercial software, for 'The year of the Linux Desktop' to happen, we need it.

Oh 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.

And that's why you don't want to use ubuntu.

Quoting: Koopacabras

Quote"the most popular Steam titles which should ‘just work’ based on reports on ProtonDB"

I'm inferring from this that they are working hard on the "weak spot" that sandboxing always had, even flatpak which is a bit superior (imho) has some shortcomings with proton emulation. Personally I won't be using it, if valve provides a deb package I will use that instead. I can't remember but I think it has some issues regarding how linking and hard linking works on sandbox mode that makes proton go bonkers.
Maybe Im barking out the wrong tree, and this is already fixed, but back in the days when proton started, steam flatpak had all kinda of issues, related to sandboxing, even Proton GE didn't work, it was a bloody mess.
Tbh it's kinda of logic, because you are running an "emulation" app (proton) on top of sandboxing, I guess it makes everything more complex.

Nothing is being emulated. Proton, which is based on WINE, is translating windows calls to Linux ones. Sandboxing is perfect here because you don’t want random windows apps and games having access to your Linux system. In fact, proton itself uses the sandboxing technology of Flatpak in it, which leads me to your anecdote of Flatpak Steam issues. I’m pretty sure you’re talking about when old versions of Flatpak didn’t support sandbox within a sandbox, so modern proton versions. This has long been fixed, and, because of the reproducible and immutable nature of Flatpak, it sometimes works better than a traditional install of Steam would. Some examples are:

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/csgo-osx-linux/issues/2815

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/6051

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/5214

Quoting: soulsourceA Mozilla developer posted about Snap (and Flatpak) just recently, and I think it's a very interesting read.

Original thread:
https://fosstodon.org/@gabrielesvelto/109976029692454638

Follow-Up with links to the bug-reports:
https://fosstodon.org/@gabrielesvelto/109981179869984715

Most of his points have already been thoroughly discussed before. I’m not sure if that’s him trying to stir up a flamewar again or is just ignorant on the topic, but they’re false anyways.

Edit: that criticism of the thread is also brought up in the replies.


Last edited by fireplace on 18 March 2023 at 11:09 pm UTC

So, 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.

Quoting: SchattenspiegelWhy?

Classic case of NIH (link)


Last edited by Klaas on 19 March 2023 at 4:20 pm UTC