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.
Every line of snap code that touches your computer is open source, so “closed off” is absolute hyperbole when you are discussing the format
Which is why I phrased my above comment in the very precise and deliberate way I did.
You don’t need to interface with canonical’s server to use snaps, you only need to do so if you want snaps that have been approved by and signed by canonical. Anyone can create a snap and privately distribute and install it, and every part of that process is open source.
Interestingly though unless it has changed recently, you can’t add a third party snap repository. Canonical’s is hard coded, and when people requested alternate repo support, the issue was closed with a response that users seeking third party repos could just edit the string and recompile. Not the most useful solution
