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.
The thing with AppImages is: it requires FUSE2 which doesn’t really get packaged/included by default anymore in a lot of places and the recommendation is “build on the most old and crusty distro you want to support” which just sounds like a nightmare in multiple ways :)
And with snaps the sandboxing only really works on Ubuntu and nowhere else last time I looked into it (then there is also the entire problem if you want to host your own repository/“storefront”).
So really the only universal sandboxing method that effectivly makes sense is Flatpak.