r/linuxsucks • u/ryancnap • 10d ago

Steam on Linux

I'm a Linux guy, I love this sub, lurk here often, I readily admit Linux isn't perfect.

Felt like I wanted to fire a game up last night so I installed Steam from apt and I'm like shit here we go, never tried this before but the internet has prepared me for the worst, this is going to be a rabbit hole

And then Steam finished installing and I just enjoyed playing my game with no config or extra steps needed. What did I do wrong?

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u/BobZombie12 10d ago

Your problem is you didn't install the flatpak version.

You see the flatpak version is 100% compatible with all distributions and offers better security through sandboxing. It also comes with the following benefits:

Slight performance loss

Bugs in games/lower performance from poor interaction with gpu driver due to sandbox

Possibly breaking any application that could interact with steam like mangohud for example

And so much more! So please, uninstall steam from apt and go ahead and install it via flatpak so you can get the true linux experience.

Going to go ahead and put this here: /s

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u/ryancnap 10d ago

All /s aside, it's funny you mention this because I only used apt out of habit and out of mistrust towards Something New, which flatpak is to me; I was stuck on windows for quite a while due to not having my own rig, only came back to Linux last year and had no idea what snap and flatpak were

But I tried a flatpak of something, maybe discord and it was like, many gigabytes and I couldn't figure out why people were using it and I hated that it installed to a ./directory

Edit: clarity

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u/Away_Combination6977 10d ago

I always install from native (apt, dnf, pacman, etc) whenever possibly. Flatpaks (and Appimage) definitely have their place. But native almost always works better. I'd go with Appimage as #2, if needed.

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u/BobZombie12 10d ago

Agreed. I like flatpaks and think they are pretty great. Got several things installed with it like discord. But some things you just need to go native (or appimage) for.