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.
That’s not my point. I use Flathub but I try to only use verified apps which were packaged by the actual dev.
I’d rather get a deb from the official dev than a flatpak from flathub packaged by someone who is essentially anonymous and could easily inject malicious code.
If you think the dev himself could inject malicious code in the official app, then you should be super aware that an anonymous Joe can too, and is far more likely to.
Anyway flatpak ideally was supposed to save Devs the work of packaging for every distro so it makes sense that the real actual verified dev of the app would package the flatpak/snap himself