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.
Snaps are a relatively recent way of packaging application installations in certain flavors of Linux. Steam is Valve’s game distribution platform (amongst other things).
There’s an unofficial Snap package to install Steam and it apparently doesn’t work so good
It’s also worth mentioning that the snap system is quite disliked by a lot of users for various reasons, like stuff not working right.
I suppose this article is a good example of snaps not working right.