Remember when Ubuntu said it was getting serious about gaming? Well, it hasn’t forgotten entirely — it’s once again asking gamers to take part in a fresh bout of testing for its Steam snap.
Steam is available on Ubuntu through traditional packaging methods but Canonical sees its Steam snap as the real future of the games platform on Ubuntu. That kinda of makes sense: it’s a tad easier to cater for the tangle of 32-bit libraries older games require using a sandboxed, separated Snap file system.
“Since publishing steam as a snap under the “Early Access” banner, we’ve been working feverishly to resolve issues and ensure it works well. We’ve done our own testing [but] now we need your help to provide game reports for your favorite games and make sure we’ve got maximum coverage of as many Steam titles as possible,” it says.
How to Test Steam Snap
To get involved, you first need to install Steam from the candidate channel. Once you’ve done that all you need to do is install and play games in your Steam library. Once you’ve given them a good go, Ubuntu asks that you submit a game report using the report tool it has bundled inside of the Steam snap.
Let’s go through that together.
To install the Steam snap candidate:
sudo snap install --candidate steam
Download will take a little while, and once complete you’ll need to open it, login, and get things set up.
Once you’re readying to start testing, first run these commands (only once):
sudo snap connect steam:hardware-observe
sudo snap connect steam:system-observe
Then, install and play your game and, when you’re ready to report your experience, run:
steam.report “Your Title”
This opens a form in your web browser with a bunch of info pre-populated (feel free to review and edit this).
Before you hit submit on this Ubuntu asks that you add the game-report label and the protondb rating as a label, (.e.g, pdb-gold).
And that’s it — get gaming!