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’m really hoping this all forces Ubuntu out as the face of desktop Linux.
It’s been pretty low tier for years now, and Canonical just proves corporate backing doesn’t guarantee a good distro.
Snap is pretty garbage, default GNOME is horrendous, the repos break every other month, apt is still pretty lame despite being an user upgrade for apt-get, the packages are neither stable nor cutting edge, they change core OS backends like every update which breaks configs and makes documentation obsolete.
I’d like to suggest Fedora as the new goto, but I feel like it’s a bit too privacy and FOSS oriented which may scare away new users.
Debian is great but it doesn’t have latest packages which isn’t optimal as performance upgrades would take time to release or need to be manually installed.
unfortunately, industry loves shit like Ubuntu and RHEL because of their corporate backing. comps love having the insurance of someone to blame or somebody to fix their shit when things hit the fan. I’ve worked for many comps who choose RHEL for that alone. Should we choose the OS built by a bunch of randos in their basement, or something backed by Red Hat where I can just pay them money to handle my support tickets faster if shit blows up? or who tf do I have my cyber liabilities insurance guys sue if the OS has a huge fuckin problem? I want a company behind that shit.