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.
APK isn’t a closed source format just because Google operates the main store.
If there was community effort someone could spin up their own snap store, this person did it https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/lol-an-open-source-snap-server-implementation/27109 - problem is, it would serve no benefit because you would have to create your own signing authority and patch snapd to use those assertions instead - and then you are still relying on a central authority to vet and sign releases and frankly I would rather have my software signed by canonical than someone random guy operating their own snap store
Again: nobody cares because practically speaking, the only people using snaps are getting them from Ubuntu, and Ubuntu pushing snaps as the default is the only reason they aren’t using flatpaks intead.
