Canonical / valve
Installing Steam on a Linux system just got a little easier now, at least if you can install a Snap package. Ubuntu maker Canonical announced today that its Steam Snap “bleeding edge” Mesa supports graphics APIs, with more improvements coming soon.
Snaps are self-contained packages that are easier for users to install without command lines and also contain the other programs and libraries they rely on, preventing conflicts between the versions of installed software applications (i.e. the hell of the dependency). They are theoretically easier to update via a store app and are sandboxed from the rest of the system. They are also not widely appreciated in the larger Linux community as they are mainly pushed by Canonical through the Snap Store and can degrade the performance of some apps.
Canonical teamed up with Steam creator Valve in March to create the Steam Snap in “Early Access”. It bakes the Mesa drivers and Proton and Wine wrappers needed for some Windows-over-Linux games, fixes the 32-bit/64-bit discrepancies for certain libraries, and handles the other necessary items that users normally use. via command would fetch -line and private repositories.
The latest Steam Snaps add support for removable media, high DPI displays and localization. Canonical states that the app also benefits from a migration to Core 22 and LZO compression. (Snaps were originally developed for the Ubuntu mobile operating system and the embedded/Internet of Things platform. It’s complicated.)
At this point, installing the Steam Snap will get the very latest Mesa drivers from Oibaf’s PPA repository. For the foreseeable future, Canonical Snap installers would like to let installers customize their installation if desired by choosing “fresh” or “turtle” Mesa drivers for the latest point release or stable releases, respectively.
In the coming months, the Steam Snap team plans to add support for the following: Feral Interactive’s GameMode (now installed by default on Ubuntu desktop); MangoHUD to overlay frames per second and other performance data; and automatically enable Proton or “Steam Play” in Steam.
The Mesa drivers in the Steam Snap won’t do much for modern Nvidia graphics cards, so Canonical found it necessary to address Nvidia, with whom it has a “close partnership”. Canonical states that it will get the latest drivers from Nvidia to its users within two months of release. Nvidia took very small, very tentative steps toward open source support earlier this year, releasing some parts of the driver but not the most important sections of the user space. It’s easier for Ubuntu and other distro makers these days to package Nvidia’s binary, proprietary drivers, but that’s about as far as openness goes.
You can grab the latest version of the Steam Snap from the Snap Store. Canonical notes that those who want to help test game compatibility can switch their Snap installation to an “edge” version and then submit reports on individual games, which appear in the GitHub discussion.
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