Canonical’s Steam Snap is now stable on Arm64

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Hi everyone!

It has been an exciting start to the year since we released a candidate version of our Steam Snap for Arm64. Following our initial announcement in January, we have received great feedback from users of many Arm64 platforms, and have since enabled the Steam Snap for many more. The following is a non-exhaustive list of platforms for which we’ve focused our testing and enablement efforts, which have shown solid performance across many popular games:

  • NVIDIA DGX Spark and associated GB10 devices
  • Qualcomm Snapdragon laptops (Lenovo Thinkpad X13s & T14s, Dell XPS 9345)
  • Radxa Orion O6 and O6N

Now that our initial development has stabilized, and we’ve resolved most of the issues raised in our testing phase, we’re excited to announce that we’ve promoted the Steam Snap to stable on Arm64.

Going forward, we’ll aim to release new versions of the Steam Snap as follows:

  • Edge: Will continue to be our experimental track. New versions may be pushed at any time. Use --edge if you want to consume the latest updates as soon as we make them available (or provide testing feedback).
  • Candidate: Edge versions will be promoted to candidate after around 1-2 weeks, assuming no significant issues are found internally or by edge users.
  • Stable: Versions will be promoted to stable after around 1-3 weeks in candidate, assuming no significant issues are found.
    • If you’re currently running candidate or edge and would like to switch to stable, you can do so with sudo snap refresh steam --channel=stable.

Please note that this is all subject to change; this remains a best-effort enablement, and timelines may vary if any urgent changes are needed.

We have also exposed FEX’s configuration options to be user-adjustable, including its library forwarding (“thunking”) toggles. Since thunking functionality is heavily game and platform-dependent, we have opted not to enable it by default on all platforms. However, we’ve internally tested it on the DGX Spark and Snapdragon X Elite devices.

  • Vulkan and drm thunking has been tested on Snapdragon Thinkpads. To enable thunking functionality, set the “drm” and “Vulkan” fields to 1 in ~/snap/steam/common/fex_config/Config.json and restart Steam.
  • GL and Vulkan thunking have been tested on the DGX Spark. To enable thunking, set the “GL” and “Vulkan” fields to 1 in ~/snap/steam/common/fex_config/Config.json and restart Steam.

Mileage may vary depending on your games and hardware.

As a reminder, the Steam Snap is not a Valve-supported project, although we thank them and the FEX developers for their incredible work. Please report any Steam Snap-specific issues to us on GitHub, or on my associated call for testing announcement.

Thanks for testing, and have fun!

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Really glad to see Orion O6 and O6N also in the list.

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Appreciate the care and support for CIX P1 devices lately with the concept image and this stable release. Is there consideration for adapting the newly released native arm64 steam client from Valve for this or potentially even an alternative package? CEF presents a significant degree of overhead especially when emulated and CPU bound scenarios are not exactly uncommon on these devices.
Some resources on the arm64 client can be found here: https://interfacinglinux.com/community/sbcsoftware/native-steam-client-for-arm-linux/, ROCKNIX has also adapted the new native client into their distro keeping both the emulated and native options around: Steam: Add ARM64 version · ROCKNIX/distribution@ce52453 · GitHub.

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We’re keeping a close eye on the native client. I’d like for us to eventually base the snap on that client version and drop our additional FEX layer, but I intend to wait at least until Proton 11 is out of beta and we’ve had more time to test that solution before doing that.

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