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.
I think if we could drag users (at least gamers) away from these Debian/Ubuntu based distros we could have developers just shipping packages that wouldn’t need to be compatible with some ancient LTS library release, and maybe we wouldn’t need appimage/flatpak/snap at all anymore (or at least only in rare cases).
From my perspective as someone who is both getting into gaming on Linux and also not much of a power user, Arch would have to make the installation and maintenance process a lot simpler to attract more people, and I’m not sure that’s something they actually want to do.
Looking at the official Arch installation guide, the average gamer may be overwhelmed by the process here, especially if they’re not comfortable with the terminal. Something like Linux Mint, on the other hand, has a built-in GUI installer with reasonable partitioning defaults, and it comes packaged with stuff like an app manger and update manager, something that will feel much more familiar to someone coming from windows.
If you want, or are interested in looking at an easier to manage Arch install I would suggest CachyOS, EndeavorOS, or Garuda Linux.
I think Debian has a place in the Desktop market, it’s just not gamers or anyone wanting anything new (unless they of course go the flatpak route). Not a perfect analogy, but it’s kinda like gaming on Windows 7 these days because it “just works” for you. Sure you can, but you’re not getting the best of anything that way and all the underlying libraries are outdated and some things just aren’t going to work at all.
Well, the only thing holding me from switching to Debian is the absence of up to date KDE packages…
