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.
This is a big issue with Snap. It may be like Flatpak, allowing devs to set their own dependencies for ALL distros, but its poor uptake outside of Ubuntu’s ecosystem means that it’s no different to yet another distro repackaging system.
Flatpak, or even Nixpkgs, are the future because they allow devs to have control over the distribution of their software. Snap being such a closed ecosystem in comparison only means it will replicate many of the problems we’ve found with traditional (re)packaging systems.
I can’t speak for Flatpak as I haven’t tried it but nixpkgs are beautiful to work with and configuration of my system has become completely reproducible in a clean format.