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.
For security reasons the packaging of flatpaks in flathub is done by flathub, whether they are devs or third parties they just write the manifest. Although I seem to remember there are some exceptions, such as firefox.
Ah, I was not aware of that. Ok, that’s good to hear because it potentially adds a layer of security.
Any idea whether they vet the code as well?
Not that I know of. But you may be interested that it requires prior authorization to modify manifests.
Excellent. Thank you