this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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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] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Valve are not going to put malicious code on their app. Neither is VLC or any other FOSS developer.

How would you know that? It's not like it's something that doesn't happen.

Or 5 Bob’s all doing the same thing with 5 copies of Valve on the Store.

It’s crazy. This is what causes fragmentation.

I don't know what snaps are like but that's clearly a non-existent problem on Flathub.

Flathub should vet every app and if you are not the dev of the app, you may not host it on Flathub. You’re still welcome to make a Flatpak for home use on your own pc but not for wide distribution.

I don't know why you feel like there's permission involved. You don't have to use Flathub, therefore Flathub can have what ever policies it likes. Users can set up a different flatpak repo if there's a need.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

That's not my point. I use Flathub but I try to only use verified apps which were packaged by the actual dev.

I'd rather get a deb from the official dev than a flatpak from flathub packaged by someone who is essentially anonymous and could easily inject malicious code.

If you think the dev himself could inject malicious code in the official app, then you should be super aware that an anonymous Joe can too, and is far more likely to.

Anyway flatpak ideally was supposed to save Devs the work of packaging for every distro so it makes sense that the real actual verified dev of the app would package the flatpak/snap himself