If you’re using Canonical’s Steam snap to game on Ubuntu you may be pleased to hear that a number appreciable performance improvements have begun to filter out.
Valve recommend Ubuntu users stick to the official Steam DEB for the best experience but plenty of Ubuntu users prefer the convenience offered by the unofficial Steam snap maintained by Canonical and available to install through App Center.
The latest release of snapd, the engine that installs, manages, and configures snap apps, includes a couple of changes that improve the performance of the Steam snap specifically.
Snapd 2.65 sees the removal of “all AppArmor and seccomp restrictions to improve user experience”.
This doesn’t mean the Steam runs un-sandboxed, rather the Steam snap is more in control of its own containers (Steam is really more of a framework than app, with multiple components, parts, and so on).
There are some detailed discussions on why confinement for the Steam snap needed to be replaced, with one snap dev noting of the permission profile:
“For now, Steam will have effectively infinite permissions to do what it wants, we might tighten this security on a case-by-case basis, especially as snapd gets more features that may allow for more fine-grained control”.
Snapd does indeed now support fine-grained user-control thanks to the Prompting Client feature in Ubuntu 24.10 which you can opt-in to from the Security Center. This asks you to give permission whenever a snap app tries to access folders outside its sandbox.
Steam Snap Opens Faster Too
Anecdotally, the latest Steam snap release paired with snapd 2.65 is also reported to open faster than before, with launch times on-par with those of the DEB version. They’re also reported to be a couple seconds faster1 than the Steam Flatpak.
No fighting!
It may be me, but I find Flatpaks in general open slower in Ubuntu than Fedora. It could be a “me” thing, or it may be down to Ubuntu’s configuration. Recently tightened AppArmor policies did stop some well-known Flatpak apps from running at all earlier this year.
Not strictly Steam related, but perhaps relevant from a gaming POV, snapd 2.65 also ships with improved snap-confine and OpenGL interface compatibility with NVIDIA drivers.
Now that Ubuntu 24.10 defaults to Wayland for NVIDIA devices these tweaks may help ensure all snap apps run in Wayland on NVIDIA work as well as they would under X, which could include Steam. Or it may not – I’m not psychic.
If you use the Steam snap do keep an eye out for the snapd 2.65 update (if you don’t already have it). From the change-log and early-bird testing it appears to delivers a better overall experience enabling you to focus on gaming and less on complaining.
Appreciated, James!
- Don’t get riled up on which format is fastest; this is ~2 seconds difference. Like most, I’d take a stable app in a format that opens marginally slower than a buggier build in a format that opens fractionally faster – YMMV. ↩︎