In the near future, Canonical wants to let Snap installers customize their install if they wish, choosing 'fresh' or 'turtle' Mesa drivers for the latest point release or stable releases, respectively. It's complicated.) AdvertisementĪt the moment, installing the Steam Snap pulls in the very latest Mesa drivers from Oibaf's PPA repository.

(Snaps were originally developed for Ubuntu's mobile OS and embedded/Internet of Things platform. Canonical states that the app also benefits from a migration to Core 22 and LZO compression. The latest Steam Snaps add support for removable media, high-DPI displays, and localization. It bakes in the Mesa drivers and Proton and Wine wrappers needed for some Windows-via-Linux games, resolves the 32-bit/64-bit discrepancies for certain libraries, and handles the other necessary items that users would typically be pulling in via command-line and private repositories. They're also not universally appreciated in the greater Linux community, as they're pushed primarily by Canonical through its Snap Store and can reduce the performance of some apps.Ĭanonical worked with Steam-creator Valve to create the Steam Snap in 'Early Access' in March. They're theoretically easier to update through a store app and are sandboxed from the rest of the system. 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., dependency hell). Ubuntu-maker Canonical announced today that its Steam Snap supports 'bleeding edge' Mesa graphics APIs, with more improvements coming soon. Installing Steam on a Linux system just got a little easier, at least if you can install a Snap package.

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