Time to sunset the "steam-installer" deb?

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27

Absolutely, it is. As I stated, I fail to see its advantage for a closed source app where the company that maintains it makes Ubuntu the primary target of their software distribution and where they (at least from a laymans perspective) have shared their concerns and have discouraged its usage.

But, after reading the development of this thread, I see that the Steam Snap is considered the way to go, with preparations to promote it to a next stage, “hiding” the option to install the Deb package.

In any case, if you consider I wasn’t respectful, feel free to ignore me.

28

There’s one simple answer, and other, side-benefits.

Canonical has an “all snap” desktop platform based on Ubuntu Core, which doesn’t support installing deb packages on the host OS. A stock Ubuntu Core-based desktop cannot install either the steam.deb from Valve or the steam-installer.deb from the Ubuntu repository. It’s as simple as that.

Side benefits:

Some people prefer to use older versions of Ubuntu. You’d be amazed how many 16.04 users there are! These (significant number) of 22.04 and older releases are getting fewer updates to critical game-related packages - such as mesa. Indeed, it’s technically challenging and time-consuming for engineers to backport drivers to one supported older LTS release, let alone multiple releases.

Having a snap package that can bundle not only the Steam client and runtime but also the necessary GPU drivers, controller support, and other requirements is a benefit for users who can’t or won’t upgrade the OS.

Also, minor quibble.

“huge amount of developers time”

The steam snap has 324 commits with most of the work being done by two developers.

Now, granted some of the work done to make the steam snap “work” will be found elsewhere, such as in the snapd steam_support interface, but even that only has a single page of commits, over three years.

It is not exactly a massive code churn with a “huge” number of developers. Maintaining a snap - even one as complex as the Steam snap, isn’t a tremendous amount of work, to be fair. It’s not zero, but it’s not a room full of developers.

For Valve, Ubuntu isn’t their primary (or even secondary) target platform for Steam. If Canonical steps up to maintain a package, be attentive to bugs, and enable users on various Ubuntu releases to play games with the latest hardware support, that seems like a benefit for those users to me.

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29

Beyond what popey explained above, there is also the fact that the sandboxing actually protects you from things like the simple typo that a Steam developer made in 2015 that accidentally deleted your rootfs simply due to the fact that you give Valve full root access to your system through dpkg… (There were plenty Ubuntu users back then that lost all their data due to this)

https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/2stuh2/security_psa_steam_for_linux_recursively_deletes/

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30

First of all, thanks for taking the time to reply to my messages.

The main selling point I heard so far would be the sandboxing and restricing Steam’s access to your system. For the others… they are not that clear if you are under the last LTS release. Overall, I understand this as a step in Canonical’s goals with Ubuntu Core.

My intention was to write this message in the thread Time to sunset the “steam-installer” deb?, don’t know if it was my mistake or if the message was moved. What I saw there was what ringed (and still rings) my alarm.

That phrase comes from here:

Don’t deny that a team of four developers working on “wrapping” a third party app for 1.5 years is a considerable -if you don’t like the word huge- investment.

Are you counting other OS’s here? Because under Linux for sure it is: Steam for Linux Client and Steam Client Troubleshooting on Linux

Actually, this criticism is perfectly understandable considering Valve’s point of view: they are targeting Ubuntu LTS but at the same time Ubuntu’s developers are encouraging a different package format that introduces a different set of bugs that are reported to their app. I would be pretty upset too.

1 Like
31

Your wish is my command. Moved it.

I actually don’t believe @ogra on this one. I think there may be another slight “over-egging” it going on. I believe what’s happening (from the outside) is there’s a sub-team of people who are tasked with making the gaming experience great on Ubuntu.

I do not believe for one hot minute that four developers are tasked 100% of their time to work on the steam snap. :smiley:

So, I can see why that got you thinking! :smiley:

Indeed. Although I heard (from someone at Canonical) that Valve asked Canonical to make the steam snap. So who knows!?

32

While this is actually correct, it is also true that the main focus of that team was around the steam snap, there are quite a few games on steam that need to interact directly with the system beyond the steam runtime and proton that needed fine tuning of the snap, snapd related interfaces or actual game launch options… this task was way bigger than just rolling a snap (which a single experienced packager could do in a few days (plus a few weeks for debugging and adjustments)), the main work here was clearly not the packaging …

1 Like
33

Can anyone share more details about that? The Snap being supported by Valve as a first class citizen is a complete different picture.

34

They didn’t say that. They just said Valve asked them to make it.

I can completely envisage a conversation where people at Canonical talk to Valve (I know they do, because I did when I worked there) and Valve say “Sure, go ahead and make that” (because valve don’t have the capacity or knowledge to build and maintain the snap themselves.)

I can also see problems with the snap early on, which frustrates the support people who mostly focus on helping out with the deb support channel. I can imagine them getting frustrated at an official-looking package from the vendor of their OS, is not as well performing as it should be.

Leading to a grumpy toot from TTimo.

:person_shrugging:

2 Likes
35

Honestly, I wish the Snap version was the only one. I trust it because it’s made by Canonical and so far I haven’t had any serious problems.

There are immutable distros focused on Flatpak, and there’s a Flatpak version of Steam that ends up being used in these distros. It would make sense for Ubuntu users to use the Snap version.

In fact, one thing I always found strange about the deb version is that it opened the terminal to finish the installation, which created a strange first impression.

While this doesn’t happen with the Snap version.

Besides, if the Snap version is the only one, it creates less confusion for users and shows Canonical’s confidence in this version.

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36

My impression as well (thoughts going towards the new and “novice” users) - it might be even frightening to see a “text based hackery type terminal” suddenly pop up; “what is going on in my PC now!? I just tried to install Steam on this Linux and now this Mr. Robot type of deal!”

These should be ironed out OR indeed to just remove the aged .deb / steam-installer. ONE package to serve them all in total clarity (?) :+1:

2 Likes
37

This is an amazing summary of the situation for a novice’s experience! All the possible show stoppers right there for anyone concerned to possibly work with.

Indeed it’s the seemingly little details that matter most moving to Linux and as Steam is the first thing the new comers install.

2 Likes
38

One thing I should bring up is that the Steam snap depends on gaming-graphics-core22, which hasn’t been updated in a while.

While the Snap was supposed to help solve the issue with Ubuntu not working properly on newer hardware (i.e. 9070 XT), it seems to not able to accomplish this due to the Snap not having Mesa 25.0/25.1, so people go to the tried-and-true method of just adding a PPA for newer Mesa.

Yes, not everyone will get a new GPU, especially since the prices are crazy, but prices were low enough at launch that everyone was celebrating for a week and people lined up. Some would definitely get one over NVIDIA due to “AMD being better on Linux than NVIDIA” due to being in the kernel.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-radeon-rx9070-linux

On the Mesa driver side, Mesa 25.0 or Mesa 25.1-devel is what’s needed. Mesa 25.0 stable is available for a few weeks now whole using Mesa 24.3 stable with the AMDGPU LLVM back-end may work but with some bugs. For those wanting the latest and greatest RadeonSI Gallium3D/OpenGL and RADV Vulkan driver support, Mesa 25.1-devel Git continues to see new optimizations and features enabled. For my testing I was using a Mesa 25.1-devel snapshot from last week using the Oibaf PPA on Ubuntu 24.10.

Curious to know: what’s the hold up on the move to core24? Would be nice to have Mesa from Oibaf PPA (but it only works on Ubuntu 24)

4 Likes
39

Here’s another very good pin pointer and more or less critical WIP. PPA’s are one of the main reasons messing up a perfectly working system. The new users don’t know what caused the updates not finishing one day. Then the blame is wrongly on Ubuntu (or even Linux altogether) …

3 Likes
40

There’s a snap for newer MESA:

$ snap info mesa-2404
name:      mesa-2404
summary:   Mesa libraries for core24 snaps
publisher: Canonical✓
store-url: https://snapcraft.io/mesa-2404
contact:   https://github.com/canonical/mesa-2404
license:   MIT
description: |
  A content snap containing the mesa libraries and drivers for `base: core24` snaps.
  
  It supports a broad range of hardware through the Mesa stack as well as Nvidia
  drivers installed from your distribution through the native SnapD support.
  
  To make use of this snap in your application, allowing for GPU acceleration on
  a broader set of hardware without including the drivers in your snap, refer to the
  documentation below:
  
  https://mir-server.io/docs/the-gpu-2404-snap-interface
  
  _Note: On some, typically desktop, systems SnapD supports loading Nvidia drivers installed on the
  host. mesa-2404 is compatible with this._
services:
  mesa-2404.component-monitor: simple, disabled, inactive
snap-id:      HyhSEBPv3vHsW6uOHkQR384NgI7S6zpj
tracking:     latest/stable/ubuntu-24.10
refresh-date: 21 days ago, at 18:00 PST
channels:
  latest/stable:    24.2.8 2025-02-19 (495) 217MB -
  latest/candidate: ↑                             
  latest/beta:      24.2.8 2025-03-03 (616) 304MB -
  latest/edge:      ↑                             
installed:          24.2.8            (495) 217MB -

If it doesn’t have it already, so long as the Steam snap is updated to core24, it would be trivial to have it use that.

41

Saw it got refreshed few days ago, but it’s not on 25.0, though.

At least there’s something already.

Will it support other channels, like in gaming-graphics-core22?

42

The only place to suggest improvements/enhancements is GitHub - canonical/steam-snap: Steam as a snap

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