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.
100% all this. Canonical has been pushing snaps for awhile, and I wonder if the 12 year LTS for Ubuntu is part of that strategy - want something newer? It’s in the snap store. snap is terrible, worse than flakpak and appimage - but just as you say, as an arch user I don’t have to care. Whatever I want is probably in the AUR if not the main repos. Rolling distros, done right (arch), are an amazing experience.