It’s been just over 6 months since we called for testing for the Steam Snap’s stable release, and about a year and a half since early access, so I thought I’d share the notable areas of progress with the Steam Snap.
Proton
One of the major blockers for Steam tends to be games that rely on Valve’s compatibility layer Proton to function. We’ve made huge strides in improving the Snap’s compatibility in this respect, including some of the changes below.
Some changes were made to snapd for the steam_support interface to better promote compatibility. These include things like allowing external drive mounts, NVIDIA drivers, network compatibility, /usr files, and /lib/libexec files.
External Libraries
Many gamers store their games on external drives, so it was an important issue to us to get external libraries up to par with the Steam deb. Now, any game libraries located in /mnt, /media/, or /run/media, /opt, /src, or /home can be used in the Steam Snap with no issues.
GameMode
We bundled GameMode into the Steam Snap so that it can be easily used just by putting gamemoderun %command% into a game’s launch arguments. This also came alongside changes to GameMode itself for compatibility with Snaps.
This relies on an xdg-desktop-portals PR that has yet to be merged.
MangoHUD
We also bundled MangoHUD into the Snap for easy usage with mangohud %command%.
Controllers
Controller support has significantly improved in the last year, with most common controllers working just as they would with the Steam deb. This includes the addition of the uinput plug as well as improvement to the steam_support interface of snapd.
NVIDIA Drivers
We’ve added improvements to snapd to better facilitate NVIDIA graphics cards, including improving the opengl and steam-support interfaces. The former should even improve NVIDIA GPU usage in other Snaps!
Debugging Tools
To assist in debugging issues, we included some simple tools and test scripts with the Steam Snap. These include test scripts, and graphics demos like glxgears and vkcube.
steamreport + nvidia32 Scripts
We include some helpful scripts with the Snap like steamreport and nvidia32, of which were explored in more detail in my previous post. In short, these tools allow users to more easily report issues and ease the barrier of entry by suggesting appropriate drivers.
Misc. Fixes
All of these changes come alongside various smaller fixes that have made the Steam Snap experience better. You can see all the closed issues here.
In addition, our wiki has been vastly improved to include a plethora of useful information, helpful tips, and even a step-by-step of our own suggested test plan so that we can more consistently test changes to the Snap.
If you haven’t tried out the Steam Snap for yourself yet, you can do so here: Install Steam on Linux | Snap Store
As always, if you have any issues, be sure to check out the GitHub repository.
