Update the README to use the steam apt repository

[Pandapip1]

Also worth noting: the program / OS versions being referenced are ancient.

[TTimo]

The direct link to the .deb installer works here (http://media.steampowered.com/client/installer/steam.deb)

Using the apt is a perfectly valid way to get setup of course, but we don't really push it to users as it's more steps, more complexity and not strictly necessary.

[Pandapip1]

Using the apt is a perfectly valid way to get setup of course, but we don't really push it to users as it's more steps, more complexity and not strictly necessary.

As someone that strongly prefers to use apt where possible, would it increase the chances of this PR getting approved for me to write a short script that can be curl <url> | sudo sh'd?

[smcv]

As someone that strongly prefers to use apt where possible, would it increase the chances of this PR getting approved for me to write a short script that can be curl <url> | sudo sh'd?

I don't think that would be a good design. Writing robust shell scripts is already difficult enough, but writing robust shell scripts that remain robust and don't do anything dangerous if the download gets truncated is even harder.

What we could (and probably should) do is to update the Steam apt repo's entry in extrepo (or in fact extrepo-data), which would reduce the installation steps to something like (untested)

sudo extrepo enable steam && sudo apt update && sudo apt install steam-launcher

We need to get extrepo-data updated anyway, when we update the signing key for #12050, so this would be a good opportunity to validate that it works.

[smcv]

the program / OS versions being referenced are ancient

Yes they are, and that's a feature: until recently, Steam has aimed to support even the oldest distros, back to around 2015. As of last week, it officially requires something from 2020 or newer, so some of the oldest information can probably be cleaned up at some point.

[Pandapip1]

Steam has aimed to support even the oldest distros, back to around 2015

This is a bit off-topic, but: I know that you discontinue support for old Windows versions about a year after they become EOL due to Chromium ending support, but I would have imagined that Chromium doesn't support EOL versions of Ubuntu either. I'm genuinely curious here--why were you supporting Ubuntu versions that old? Is it because of the original SteamOS? Was it just that there weren't many changes that needed to be made to keep it working? I'd love to know!

[smcv]

I don't set the policy, I just help Valve to implement it. But I believe the reasons go something like this:

• There is only one Windows, but there are lots of Linux distributions with varying levels of update rate and support lifetime. Just because something is EOL in Debian that doesn't mean a contemporary version is necessarily EOL in Ubuntu, and so on.
• Ubuntu in particular has a series of different extended support lifetimes, depending how many subscriptions to Canonical services you have, resulting in a lack of clarity about which of the various EOL dates is a good point to cut off at.
• Until recently, the Steam client on Linux didn't have a way to warn users that their outdated distro was going to become unsupported, so it would continue working with no obvious cause for concern until it eventually hit a genuine problem and stopped working entirely, which is not a great UX. The new minimum glibc referred to in https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/107F-BB20-FB5A-1CE4 is the first time it has been able to pre-announce "this is going to stop working" to encourage users to upgrade before it's too late.
• On Linux, the steamwebhelper (the part that is based on Chromium) runs in a container (a side-effect of work that was being done anyway to make games more cross-distro compatible), so it has a much weaker dependency on the host OS being recent than on Windows.
• Until recently, the old LTS distributions did basically still work in practice, so they were only announced to be unsupported when it was genuinely causing a problem (which of course is really too late). The most recently-dropped was Ubuntu 16.04, in 2023, because its apt was too old for us to be able to follow then-current best practices for third-party apt repositories.

[Pandapip1]

That's cool information! Thank you!