Canonical's Steam Snap is Causing Headaches for Valve - OMG! Ubuntu
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Canonical may be ramping up its efforts to improve the Ubuntu gaming experience — yasss — but it seems their Steam snap package is causing a few headaches

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.

  • firecat
    -17•11 months ago

    Just tell the billion dollar company to allow people to download the games on their browser. The Client only exists as a means to DRM and analytics, there’s no actual reason for games not to become standalone.

    • @[email protected]
      27•8 months ago

      That’s pretty unfair. Before Valve’s efforts, the first thing we PC gamers asked eachother about a new game was always “could you get it running?”

      Three bad old days were quite bad, and they started getting better in lock step with Valve’s improvements to Steam.

      Correlation/causation and all that. But for a lot of us Valve earned a lot of goodwill simply by allowing “request a refund” on games that run poorly. (Edit: which was apparently forced on Valve by a government. Valve got lucky there!)

      • AlteredStateBlob
        12•11 months ago

        Their refund policy is due to getting slapped around in EU courts, not because valve is benevolent or anything. I do like steam a lot, but it is a near monopoly which acts as DRM to a degree. They did and would abuse that power unless regulated.

        • @[email protected]English
          13•11 months ago

          I believe their refund policy is actually from ACCC in Australia, rather than European rulings

          • AlteredStateBlob
            5•11 months ago

            You’re correct, Australia played a big role in it, and the EU was passing regulation around 2015 on that issue as well. So they got slapped around in Australia and changed it up before getting slapped around in the EU.

      • @AnUnusualRelic
        1•11 months ago

        A lot of people these days have no idea what has happened outside of the few years they’ve been in contact with the industry. Computing might as well have started in 2005 when you listen to them.

      • firecat
        -3•11 months ago

        As someone who was during those times, your Zgen knowledge is very incorrect. The games did work, including Crisis (original). As to why the myth you hear from fellow Zgen gamers; it’s because graphics cards were invented. Brand new, no one knew what they were doing with them. The companys Renzen and Nvidia started sponsoring games, it’s how they became popular, their logos were part of the game, Metal Gear Solid revengeance is proof of this.

        Steam had no part in gaming history, they were not the first online platform. Dell made wild target before Valve Corporation was founded. Lootbox was invented before Steam launched it, Yahoo games (anyone remember them) in japan had the concept down to almost todays standards. Valve had nothing to do with gaming history, they are just known for their lawsuits and anti competitive behavior.