Linux

I'm sure Canonical's neverending death march towards Snap, along with the OS running outdated packages, is why Valve no longer uses Ubuntu for SteamOS development. The greatest April Fools was Ubuntu dropping Snaps because so many people were saying how they could go back to using Ubuntu again...then they noticed it was a joke and the sadness set in.

The article says that steam showing a notice on snap installs that it isn't an official package and to report errors to snap would be extreme. But that seems pretty reasonable to me, especially since the small package doesn't include that in its own description. Is there any reason why that would be considered extreme, in the face of higher than normal error rates with the package, and lack of appropriate package description?

~~Canonical's Steam~~ Snap is Causing Headaches ~~for Valve~~

I don't even want to hate on Snap, I just think Flatpak is probably superior in almost every way and it's probably not great that there are three competing formats for "applications with dependencies included". It was supposed to be "package your app to this format, dear developer, so everyone can use it no matter the distro they use", now it's a bit more complicated. Frustrating, as this means developers without that many resources will only offer some formats and whichever you (or your distro) prefers might not be available.

I know that you can get every format to work on every distro (AppImages are just single binaries you can execute), but each has their own first class citizen.

By the way, the unofficial Steam Flatpak has been working well for me under Fedora 39 KDE Spin, but an official one would be great to have.

That's the problem with doing everything yourself.

You also have to maintain everything, yourself.

Fuck snaps 🖕

Who the fuck was asking for a Steam Snap.

JFC

Give up on snaps. It's not gonna happen. Whatever benefits they claim they could provide could be merged into Flatpak and everyone wins.

I know the "Arch BTW" meme exists for a reason, but one of the reasons I haven't been able to drag myself away from Arch-based distros in recent years is that it allows me to always have current versions of my software while also just not having to care about all this appimage/flatpak/snap brouhaha.

I guess it's somewhat of a "pick your poison" kind of situation, but I find dealing with the typical complaints about Arch based distros to be both less of a problem than detractors would have you believe, and less of a headache than having to pick one of three competing alternative packaging approaches, or worse, to use a mix of them all. Standing on the sidelines of the topic it seems like a small number of people really like that these options exist, and I'm happy for those people. But mostly I'm grateful that I don't have to care about this kind of thing.

Edited to add: Seeing how this thread has developed in the past 5 hours convinces me anew that "on the sidelines" is where I want to stay on this topic. 😁

Canonical is a joke

This is a big issue with Snap. It may be like Flatpak, allowing devs to set their own dependencies for ALL distros, but its poor uptake outside of Ubuntu's ecosystem means that it's no different to yet another distro repackaging system.

Flatpak, or even Nixpkgs, are the future because they allow devs to have control over the distribution of their software. Snap being such a closed ecosystem in comparison only means it will replicate many of the problems we've found with traditional (re)packaging systems.

The one Linux Distro that people will look for out of popularity, fucking up the of the Linux user base? Of course, thanks canonical.

Let me simplify that: ~~Canonical's Steam~~ Snap is Causing Headaches ~~for Valve~~

Ubuntu used to get a lot of undeserved hate but lately the hate feels deserved. Ubuntu has been the face of the usable desktop Linux for a long time and they just keep tripping over themselves every time they try to move forward.

Their intentions are usually good. A lot of things they propose usually end up being adopted by the community at large (just not their implementation). They seem to just yank everyone's chain a little too hard in the direction we're eventually going to go and we all resent them for that.

Off the top of my head, there was Upstart (init system), there was unity (desktop), and now snaps (containerized packaging). All of these were good ideas but implemented poorly and with a general lack of support from the community. In almost each case in the past what's happened is that once they run out of developers who champion the tech, they eventually get onboard with whatever Debian and Rhel are doing once they were caught up and settled.

Valve's lack of interest in maintaining the snap makes sense. The development on the Ubuntu platform is very opinionated in a way where the developers of the software (valve) really want nothing to do with Canonicals snaps.

On another note: my favorite thing about the Ubuntu server was LXD + ZFS integration. Both have been snapified. It was incredibly useful and stable. Stephane Graber has forked the project now into INCUS. It looks very promising.

Would be cool if they just straight up supported flatpaks. That's been my main way of gaming for a couple years now, and it works great. The downside is that the folder structure is confusing so it makes things like modding pretty difficult.

Good. Snap is an abomination.

I feel the same. My entry distro was ubuntu, and every time I updated major version the whole installation exploded and i had to reinstall it from scratch.

Luckly for me now i use Debian and updating major release is smooth af. Already went through 3 major updates and 0 problems.

Just swap to Debian, Valve. And snap is engineered to waste your time, imo.

The problem is that 3rd parties are doing the packaging both on Snap and Flatpak whereas if they had followed proper security practice ONLY THE REAL DEV should ever be allowed to package their app as a Flatpak or Snap.

This would ensure security, as well as a proper functioning flatpak/snap and also all feedback would be directed to the Dev.

I've never liked the fact that Canonical and whoever can make Snaps and Flatpaks of other people's software. There is zero security guarantee, zero guarantee they'll update it and zero guarantee it will work.

Just because Snap and Flatpak exist doesn't mean just anyone should be able to just make them.

If Valve only chooses to make a deb then so be it! It's their product!