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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 9 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] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

As a dev, you can just distribute a nixpkg with whatever build tool inside. That beats the current system of "native" packages where your software is repacked and then maintained by half a dozen teams for different distros that use different dependencies and update cadences.

Bottles has gone as far as to demand its fedora package be removed and now shows a warning if you're not using the flatpak version because repackers just don't properly test all their software (how can they? there are thousands of apps in these repos!)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah there are some issues with compatibility, I've found a couple of apps that error on my Mac.

How does it compare to Flatpak?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

nix is a "native" packaging format. Apps are compiled for your host OS and run in that environment with no restrictions, for better or worse.

Flatpaks are containers. They provide a virtual OS to the application such as the file system, and accessing host OS features is done through "portals" which just means you can give/revoke the ability of the app to access your host OS resources such as networking, file access etc.

Flatpaks are therefore much safer in theory. But Nix packages are lower overhead, and can interact like any built-in software binary that you'd have when you spin up a fresh install of, say, debian.

Nix packages are harder to use IMO thanks to their poor documentation and lack of GUI package manager support (not that it's impossible, just that it's been a niche system for most of its life) and since most people are accustomed to flatpaks and their permissions system (and the fact it comes preinstalled on most distros) so flatpak is still pretty ubiquitous, even for NIxOS users