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.
Don’t they own the Code?
Can’t they just cease-and-desist them if they cause them trouble?
They could and they would if they wouldn’t profit from this in the end,
for some reasons there is no official Flatpak and they don’t want to support a Snap package, they just say anything but the *.deb is unsupported, kinda weird because they use the Flatpak package on Steamdeck because that is Arch-based, i guess they are somewhat involved there.
As much as they do for the Linux movement, they should get their shit together when it comes to a cross-distro client, preferably Flatpak obviously.
Do they use the steam flatpak, or just allow flatpaks to be used? There’s a difference.
the latter