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 didnt want to hate snap either, until I found out its proprietary technology… on a foss OS… since then I‘m pretty over it - and ubuntu for that matter. I‘ll probably switch to debian once ubuntu 23.10 runs out of support.
Well… Flatpak ships Propietary Software too. And at this point Propietary Software is almost avoidable (unless you have a LibreBoot. I want one too). But it’s reasonable to be frustrated that an operating system as influential as Ubuntu has ended up falling so down in its technology, and that it has the support of a company like Chanonical.
Edit: Thank you for the comments. I didn’t noticed Snap itself is propietary.
Not sure if I understand you correctly. Flatpak itself is not proprietary afaik and while people might make flatpaks of proprietary software, the problem with snap is that the snap system itself is proprietary afaik.
So every open source software packaged in snap gets this proprietary stain added to it. Thats what actually bothers me.
There’s a misunderstanding here. What we mean is that the Snap system itself is proprietary. The server side is proprietary and there’s no way to add repos other than Canonical’s.
Flatpak is open, and anybody can create/add a remote.
Both can be used to package and distribute proprietary software. But the same could be said of .deb or .rpm
I think they meant that the Snap itself (or part of it) is proprietary. But I’m not sure.