Why the Steam deb from Canonical has been broken since 23.04
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.
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.
That's where the comment is coming from. You still have your right of choice, doesn't mean that your individual choice is in line with other people's goals.
Brace yourself for the punchline: I don't 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 distro's dev team to do those things. I do not trust people uploading Flatpaks for distribution to cover those things (even, or perhaps especially, if it's software they've developed—the number of blind spots developers can have about their own environments is terrifying). "Why does [preference X] not work inside this Flatpak?" 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. There's 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 it's your distro that's introducing the bugs as was the case here.
This is legit and I have to give you this. It's not perfect but to me, can't ever recall a time a workaround was not available. Most of the time, you'll 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 don't want to use that distro-agnostic resource hog flatpak. Better than snap for sure, but I still don't 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 don't even have the physical space for it.
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
Thanks for posting this. I couldn't figure out why Steam was broken on my laptop for the last 3 weeks or so. Installing the .deb from the Steam website fixed it. I'm starting to get fed up with Canonical.
Pretty sad state of affairs :|
Just install the flatpak version to add insult to that self-inflicted injury. Works pretty well for me.
installing i386 packages on an x86_64 install has always been more annoying than it should be.
I guess one question is: why is it still 32-bit? Feels like something Valve should be updating now.
I'd wonder if it is too maintain compatibility with 32-bit titles?
TL;DR is that wine doesn't yet support WoW64 (Windows on Windows64), which enables the running of 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit system - it's conceptually similar to multilib on Linux. You can't run 32-bit Windows bins on a purely 64-bit WINE as I understand it.
But the Steam launcher doesn't run on Wine. Some games may run on Proton but one shouldn't depend on the other AFAIK?
well, Wine does support WoW64, but the way it's implemented requires you to install both 32 and 64 bit Wine.
yes, many games have 32-bit builds (though maybe Valve can just use 32-bit Steam Runtime to preserve compatibility)
"Yes. Do as I say."
I tried Ubuntu's 23.10 daily build yesterday. The new Snap store was very nice. They also showed versions on the Snap Steam install and it looks like it has been updated recently. I installed it with Snap. I then tried to run Baldur's Gate 3 (Great Game!) and it wouldn't launch.
So I went back to 23.04 and used the DEB from the Steam website in install Steam. It worked. Hope they get it working for everyone.
This is off topic, but why is it that if I go to their download Steam web page on openSUSE, it has me download the .deb package?
Presumably they just either haven’t made a proper package for opensuse, or their platform detection isn’t perfect. Since Debian based distros are the most common, sometimes companies will only distribute Deb files…
In any case, I’d personally recommend getting steam via flatpak, it works quite well.
The flatpak is what I eventually settled on, but I was a little confused initially. Upon initially installing the flatpak, I was having some minor issues, so I was going to try to see if installing it natively was any better, but there seemed to be no way to.
I eventually figured out that I really just needed to launch Steam on my dedicated GPU instead of my integrated graphics. Now it runs fine.
It used to be that everything was packaged in an RPM, now DEB runs the show.