this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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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.

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[–] danielfgom 17 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (16 children)

The problem is that 3rd parties are doing the packaging both on Snap and Flatpak whereas if they had followed proper security practice ONLY THE REAL DEV should ever be allowed to package their app as a Flatpak or Snap.

This would ensure security, as well as a proper functioning flatpak/snap and also all feedback would be directed to the Dev.

I've never liked the fact that Canonical and whoever can make Snaps and Flatpaks of other people's software. There is zero security guarantee, zero guarantee they'll update it and zero guarantee it will work.

Just because Snap and Flatpak exist doesn't mean just anyone should be able to just make them.

If Valve only chooses to make a deb then so be it! It's their product!

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (8 children)

The problem is that 3rd parties are doing the packaging both on Snap and Flatpak whereas if they had followed proper security practice ONLY THE REAL DEV should ever be allowed to package their app as a Flatpak or Snap.

Says who? If it were the case, Linux would either be a nightmare of fragmentation or become centralised on one distribution. Distros need to be able to package their own software, and these are kind of like distributions. Also since we're talking about proprietary software here, is it really any better security practice if the "real dev" packages it or somebody else, they both could contain malicious code.

[–] danielfgom 6 points 11 months ago (7 children)

Valve are not going to put malicious code on their app. Neither is VLC or any other FOSS developer.

The distros should stick to packaging their repo apps and leave the Snap/FlatPak tech as an alternative to the original dev if they decide they want to use that.

We can't have Bob from nowhere packaging Valve, then not updating it or patching it because he doesn't have time. Or 5 Bob's all doing the same thing with 5 copies of Valve on the Store.

It's crazy. This is what causes fragmentation. Flathub should vet every app and if you are not the dev of the app, you may not host it on Flathub. You're still welcome to make a Flatpak for home use on your own pc but not for wide distribution.

[–] jyte 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

isn't that kind of what AUR is, and exactly what people love about arch ?

[–] danielfgom 4 points 11 months ago

Yes but if you use an Arch distro like Endeavour, they won't support you with issues caused by AUR apps. Because of these reasons I mentioned.

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