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.
Snap isn’t a standard actually. It’s closed off.
Hence I picked the word “format”.
Mmm.
Every line of snap code that touches your computer is open source, so “closed off” is absolute hyperbole when you are discussing the format
Canonical specifically went out of their way to create a closed ecosystem with snaps, and you think that’s not “closed off” because they only allow you to download the open source parts of the snap software?
The server is proprietary.
Which is why I phrased my above comment in the very precise and deliberate way I did.
You don’t need to interface with canonical’s server to use snaps, you only need to do so if you want snaps that have been approved by and signed by canonical. Anyone can create a snap and privately distribute and install it, and every part of that process is open source.
Yeah, but nobody cares about your technical “gotcha.”
APK isn’t a closed source format just because Google operates the main store.
If there was community effort someone could spin up their own snap store, this person did it https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/lol-an-open-source-snap-server-implementation/27109 - problem is, it would serve no benefit because you would have to create your own signing authority and patch snapd to use those assertions instead - and then you are still relying on a central authority to vet and sign releases and frankly I would rather have my software signed by canonical than someone random guy operating their own snap store
Again: nobody cares because practically speaking, the only people using snaps are getting them from Ubuntu, and Ubuntu pushing snaps as the default is the only reason they aren’t using flatpaks intead.
I care. It is interesting.
Interestingly though unless it has changed recently, you can’t add a third party snap repository. Canonical’s is hard coded, and when people requested alternate repo support, the issue was closed with a response that users seeking third party repos could just edit the string and recompile. Not the most useful solution