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.
nix is a “native” packaging format. Apps are compiled for your host OS and run in that environment with no restrictions, for better or worse.
Flatpaks are containers. They provide a virtual OS to the application such as the file system, and accessing host OS features is done through “portals” which just means you can give/revoke the ability of the app to access your host OS resources such as networking, file access etc.
Flatpaks are therefore much safer in theory. But Nix packages are lower overhead, and can interact like any built-in software binary that you’d have when you spin up a fresh install of, say, debian.
Nix packages are harder to use IMO thanks to their poor documentation and lack of GUI package manager support (not that it’s impossible, just that it’s been a niche system for most of its life) and since most people are accustomed to flatpaks and their permissions system (and the fact it comes preinstalled on most distros) so flatpak is still pretty ubiquitous, even for NIxOS users