this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
742 points (99.1% liked)

Linux

48655 readers
395 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Because many apps will (or would prefer to) only be bundled as Flatpak. I agree that the deduplication is not a trivial problem to solve, even if they might have already solved it for DEBs (I don't know).

But your entire comment could just as well be a rant why Canonical shouldn't have introduced Snaps in the first place. It might be good for their bank account, if they can somehow monetize part of the cake, but splitting the cake even further, after it's already split into DEB, RPM, AppImage, Flatpak, Docker, APK etc., that's maximum user confusion.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Because many apps will (or would prefer to) only be bundled as Flatpak.

This reads like speculation to me and is directly contrary to the file counts on flathub and snapcraft. What about CLI apps and server software? How are they supposed to distribute their software if not via snap? (Flatpak doesn't support this well)

could just as well be a rant why Canonical shouldn't have introduced Snaps in the first place

You are acting like Ubuntu core (and snaps) came after flatpak? Snaps were announced almost a decade ago

Like, I get you don't like snaps, but your argument is basically "every Linux distribution should ship the same default software, and it should be the software I choose"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I don't know why you're trying to interpret all kinds of things into my comment. I did not say any of that. This isn't some competition to show who's technically more correct.