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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Canonical's Steam Snap is Causing Headaches for Valve (www.omgubuntu.co.uk)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

Proprietary on the server/distribution end
Controlled 100% by Canonical
Worse performance, particularly in terms of app startup times
Snaps are mounted as separate filesystems, so it can make things look cluttered in your file explorer or when you're listing stuff with lsblk
Canonical often forces users to use Snaps even when users have explicitly tried to install with apt. e.g. you run sudo apt install firefox and it installs a Snap
It hasn't gained traction with other distros like Flatpak has, and Canonical's insistence on backing the "wrong" standard means Linux will continue to be more fragmented than it would be if they also went along with what has become the de facto standard

There are however benefits of snaps. It works for better for terminal programs, and Canonical can even package system stuff like the kernel as a snap - as you can imagine, this might be a very powerful tool when it comes to an immutable version of Ubuntu.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Proprietary on the server/distribution end

Zoinks!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Snaps just act strange. They update in weird ways, it’s always automatic and it’s confusing how to keep something in a version that won’t auto update. It’s been a bad experience for me.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Snap startup times are awful, tens of seconds to open a simple text editor, even on an nvme ssd....

edit: Also it doesnt bother following XDG specifications, further cluttering our home folders.