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

Linux

48323 readers
660 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
[–] krellor@kbin.social 160 points 10 months ago (3 children)

The article says that steam showing a notice on snap installs that it isn't an official package and to report errors to snap would be extreme. But that seems pretty reasonable to me, especially since the small package doesn't include that in its own description. Is there any reason why that would be considered extreme, in the face of higher than normal error rates with the package, and lack of appropriate package description?

[–] Kushia@lemmy.ml 94 points 10 months ago

It's not extreme. This is an opinion piece posted on OMGUbuntu, so I'll let you figure out where their biases lie.

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 52 points 10 months ago

Honestly, that seems like the nicest way to solve the problem. Afaik Valve would be fully within their rights to C&D them from unofficially rehosting their binaries. In any other situation, that would be a blatant security risk.

[–] ook_the_librarian@lemmy.world 12 points 10 months ago

Was an unextreme solution mentioned? I don't see one. It seems very reasonable.

What would more extreme, but not inappropriate, is for Valve to send a cease and desist to stop Canonical from using the Steam logo on a package Valve does not maintain. I don't think that's warranted. But calling a little text clarification "extreme" is nonsense.

But Canonical using that logo is pretty misleading. I notice the thumbnail adds some Canonical-flare to the logo, but it's not there on snapcraft.