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.
Shared containers work beautifully for a lot of things, though, many programs aren’t all that sensitive either. Making snaps for the tricky ones makes sense. Having snaps for all of them is ridiculous.
I can count the software requiring repo-pins on one hand on my desktop. For those, snaps make sense, replacing the need for any pins. Snaps are less confusing than pins. IMO.
It reminds me of Python programming, with requirements pinned to version ranges. Some dev-teams forget, and their apps won’t work out of the box. Sometimes, software still works ten years later, if they only use the most common arguments and commands from the packages.
Snaps <==> Virtualenv.