I must say that this is both quite unexpected, as well as very appreciated. No more messing about with deb repos and backports just to launch things like media centers, curious to see if we'll get a controller friendly desktop portal to go with it.

Hopefully this also means Valve are looking into cross-distro packaging of Steam games, since one of their Linux developers did comment about designing a Flatpak - then xdg-app - inspired packaging system for the runtime and applications.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyI kinda like Flatpak, but it seems to me like a useful secondary thing rather than something that can or should kill .deb or .rpm and apt and so on.

It's worth noting that Flatpak is not designed to compete with system package managers, which neither Snappy nor AppImage are trying to do either.

Flatpak is designed for packaging userland applications in a way that means users don't have to worry about dependencies, and the sandboxing means you don't have to worry about broken code damaging your system either.
Additionally, it can be run entirely in a user's home, so users don't need to pester sysadmins about installing applications or dependencies - nor about keeping them up-to-date.

I'm actually more of a fan of Flatpak than Snappy in this particular case, Snappy requires a system daemon while Flatpak only requires an application in PATH - on a new kernel it doesn't even require setuid.

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Worth noting is that the Flatpak install is unable to access your home folder, so even if it wanted to conflict with your full Steam install that would be impossible for it to do. You can even run both Steam installs at the same time because of the sandboxing
I'm unsure how well non-nVidia drivers work for Flatpak at the moment though, only have nVidia systems on hand.

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