Why the Steam deb from Canonical has been broken since 23.04
Why the Steam deb from Canonical has been broken since 23.04
i386 in Ubuntu won't die
tl;dr In a recent thread on Mastodon, it was revealed that Ubuntu 23.04 users can’t 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 shouldn’t 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 “This is Canonical breaking the deb, so you’re forced to use the snap”. But that doesn’t appear to be the case.
It’s just a simple mistake that is fixed, and now (a selected set of) i386 packages will be easily accessible again.
Everyone should just use the flatpak. You can get the latest version, latest Mesa, latest mangohud etc on any distro and it will all work exactly the same.
Not sure why you are getting downvotes. This is clearly the way for users who just wants their apps to work.
Because "users who just want their apps to work" is only a subset of "everyone" (and for them, yes, Flatpak is a reasonable solution to this kind of issue).
I'm part of a different and non-overlapping subset: if something doesn't work as advertised, that isn't acceptable. If there's a distro-native package and it won't install and run, then that's a bug and should be treated as such.
If you use "everyone" when you know that there are people out there who disagree with you, you should expect to get some flak.
I'm fine with just using the .deb .
I don't dislike flatpak and it's good that it exists but I prefer not using it if I don't have to.
Flatpak will probably be the official default format for non-open software in the future.
I've basically used Flatpak for every GUI application now just cause it usually works. People can dispute how efficient it is but I don't have the time to debug a bunch, what works, works.
Flatpak doesn't run the latest stuff typically. Like I'm on Mesa 23.1.4 on Flatpak and 23.1.6 on Fedora. Probably newer than what Ubuntu has though.
If you are installing the latest mesa, you want to use it when playing?
This is still a statement, even with the question mark