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.
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.
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