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.
Personally, I don’t get why devs would elect to package for Snap, in favor of Flatpak or AppImage. I guess, if your toolchain offers Snap packaging out of the box, then might as well. But aside from that, do you not just reach fewer users…?
Yes and no. Last time I checked, Ubuntu was the most used desktop Linux OS, and it obviously uses Snap (and has Flatpak disabled by default).
Ah, I hadn’t realized Canonical was so awful as to disable the format everyone else agreed on, but seems you’re right: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/02/ubuntu-flavors-no-flatpak
Ubuntu itself never natively came with Flatpak though. Some flavours might have, but their marketshare is also a lot smaller.
Of course, if Ubuntu ever decided to ship with Flatpak natively, that would instantly become the obvious choice.
How do you figure? For example, Arch Linux community on r*ddit is bigger than the Ubuntu one
Where did you get the numbers?
Hard to find raw numbers backed by good sources.
If you filter the Steam Hardware Survey for December 2023 by Linux, you can see Arch has a market share of 7.85% (excluding SteamOS on the Deck, which is technically based on Arch and has 40.53%) while Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS - a specific Ubuntu version - already has 7.04% on its own.
But that’s also just Steam users. Ubuntu is one of the few Linux distributions that OEMs ship preinstalled and officially support on some of their devices (Dell for example). Another example is Fedora iirc, which Lenovo ships or at least used to ship as an option on some of their ThinkPad notebooks.
I’d assume the Arch community on Reddit is bigger than the Ubuntu community as it’s geared towards tech-savvy people. Going by Reddit community size wouldn’t make much sense though. Even if you add up the member count of the r/windows, r/windows10 and r/windows11 community (which doesn’t make a lot of sense as most users are probably not unique), it’s only like 3-4x the members of r/archlinux, which doesn’t translate to market share whatsoever.
I don’t really have hard numbers, sorry. Should’ve checked first. I guess I just assumed because of the OEM support and being relatively easy to install and maintain for the average guy (in comparison) that it was the leading Linux desktop distro in terms of marketshare. I’m still assuming this is the case for the reasons stated, but can’t tell you with 100% certainty.
It’s impossible to measure since sharing copyleft stuff can’t be tracked like sales of proprietary software can. There’s no need to apologize about not doing the impossible.
Well, most of windows users don’t even know they are using it, they think they are using a “PC” as opposed to Mac
Any Linux desktop user is already very tech savvy, I doubt there are any Ubuntu users that don’t know they are using Ubuntu so the windows commission is not apt
If you’re on Ubuntu, you can just ask your question in the normal Linux community or in a search engine. You don’t need to go to a special Ubuntu community.
That’s at least, how it makes sense to me. In general, I’ve seen many niche distros have very active communities, because everyone just ruts together and helps each other out.
…which is to say, I don’t think there are accurate marketshare statistics, because no telemetry, but my impression is also that Ubuntu is still popular out in the wild.