tl;dr In a recent thread on Mastodon, it was revealed that Ubuntu 23.04 users canât install the Steam deb package from the Ubuntu archive without jumping through some technical hoops. It turns out this was a mistake, a bug was filed, and future builds shouldnât have this problem.
Steam - the game store/launcher from Valve requires a bunch of 32-bit libraries to function. Many of the games that Steam installs also require many of these various libraries. These older games are likely never going to get updated to have 64-bit clean builds.
The thread on Mastodon brought up an expected thought process, though. The conspiracy theory-minded might (reasonably) think âThis is Canonical breaking the deb, so youâre forced to use the snapâ. But that doesnât appear to be the case.
Itâs just a simple mistake that is fixed, and now (a selected set of) i386 packages will be easily accessible again.
Not sure why you are getting downvotes. This is clearly the way for users who just wants their apps to work.
Because âusers who just want their apps to workâ is only a subset of âeveryoneâ (and for them, yes, Flatpak is a reasonable solution to this kind of issue).
Iâm part of a different and non-overlapping subset: if something doesnât work as advertised, that isnât acceptable. If thereâs a distro-native package and it wonât install and run, then thatâs a bug and should be treated as such.
If you use âeveryoneâ when you know that there are people out there who disagree with you, you should expect to get some flak.
Sounds to me like you would rather cry about Ubuntu-specific bugs and hope and wait they fix those bugs that break your program than use a distro-agnostic solution such as Flatpaks with zero such possibility of bug.
I think I can confidently say that everyone in the range of 4/4 users would rather not put up with bugs if they could avoid them and that 10/10 would prefer their programs to launch when they press the icon. Made up but it should be obvious.
Thatâs where the comment is coming from. You still have your right of choice, doesnât mean that your individual choice is in line with other peopleâs goals.
Brace yourself for the punchline: I donât even use Ubuntu, and what I said is not specific to any distro. Making sure that packages work, and work properly, is the single most important job a distro does.
Correct integration matters to me. Testing by someone trusted matters to me. I trust my distroâs dev team to do those things. I do not trust people uploading Flatpaks for distribution to cover those things (even, or perhaps especially, if itâs software theyâve developedâthe number of blind spots developers can have about their own environments is terrifying). âWhy does [preference X] not work inside this Flatpak?â is not an uncommon topic.
Anyway, I can confidently say that the number of users whose PCs have Windows on them and not Linux approaches 10/10 too. Thereâs a reason argumentum ad popularum is a fallacy.
You are clearly wrong as Ubuntu disabling x32 apps here is what caused the problem. If a distro as big as Ubuntu could never be trusted to test Steam, what chance does your distro X have?
All this flies out of the window when itâs your distro thatâs introducing the bugs as was the case here.
This is legit and I have to give you this. Itâs not perfect but to me, canât ever recall a time a workaround was not available. Most of the time, youâll find an issue like a plugin that is hardcoded to call to a library using the standard distro path or something like that.
But more users catch this stuff and share solutions to the Flatpak community.
Yes, I donât want to use that distro-agnostic resource hog flatpak. Better than snap for sure, but I still donât have countless gigabytes of storage for countless versions of whole operating systems to run this and that app. No, storage is not cheap, at all, especially when you donât even have the physical space for it.