Valve is seeing an increasing number of bug reports for issues caused by Canonical's repackaging of the Steam client through snap.
The best way to install Steam on Debian and derivative operating systems is to follow the instructions at http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ and use the official .deb
We are not involved with the snap repackaging. It has a lot of issues.
If you don't want the .deb, please at least consider the flatpak version.
@TTimo This has affected people internally too. I had to spend far too long trying to figure out why SteamVR was not working for someone, turns out they were using the Snap which is the default on the store + apt!
Ubuntu forwarding apt -> snap for certain package names is prime what-the-fuck-ery and actively hostile design.
@SheepZone it's not officially supported either, but I hear it fares much better. Last time we looked at it there were concerns about performance overhead in some situations.
Hey @TTimo, volunteer for Flathub here. Do you happen to recall the concerns or have a link discussing them that I can share with the Flatpak and Flathub teams? It would be great to learn if/where the tech falls short to see if we could remedy it. :)
@TTimo@cassidy Much like one of the later comments in that bug report, I wonder how much of that is Linux 4.17 through 5.15 turning on an expensive Spectre mitigation by default when seccomp is used. Consensus seems to be that the mitigation isn't actually helping in practice, and Linux stopped doing it: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/2f46993d83ff4abb310e
I notice that that bug report was with Fedora 33, which would be affected; Fedora ≥36 wouldn't be. For Ubuntu, 20.04 (and 18.04.5) would be affected but not 22.04.
It's possible to opt out, but the software that applies the filter (Flatpak and Snap in this case) would have to do it.
@cassidy@TTimo not to be a troll or to act entitled to open source volunteers in any way (I am myself an unpaid OSS volunteer), but there's been a bug with nvidia driver reinstallation for 3 1/2 years that seems never to get fixed + renders it unusable for me.
I also had flatpak ironically break gtk for me when I tried to uninstall it, as a result of both of these things I won't be using flatpak for anything, let alone steam.
So can't say I'm hugely convinced that flatpak is a great alternative.
I btw obviously realise this might be:
a. an nvidia thing that flatpak can't do anything about
b. a(n arch linux) packaging problem flatpak (ironically for software designed to solve this problem) can't do anything about
BUT in practical terms it makes flatpak simply non-viable for me.
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