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.
Because “users who just want their apps to work” is only a subset of “everyone” (and for them, yes, Flatpak is a reasonable solution to this kind of issue).
I’m part of a different and non-overlapping subset: if something doesn’t work as advertised, that isn’t acceptable. If there’s a distro-native package and it won’t install and run, then that’s a bug and should be treated as such.
If you use “everyone” when you know that there are people out there who disagree with you, you should expect to get some flak.
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Brace yourself for the punchline: I don’t even use Ubuntu, and what I said is not specific to any distro. Making sure that packages work, and work properly, is the single most important job a distro does.
Correct integration matters to me. Testing by someone trusted matters to me. I trust my distro’s dev team to do those things. I do not trust people uploading Flatpaks for distribution to cover those things (even, or perhaps especially, if it’s software they’ve developed—the number of blind spots developers can have about their own environments is terrifying). “Why does [preference X] not work inside this Flatpak?” is not an uncommon topic.
Anyway, I can confidently say that the number of users whose PCs have Windows on them and not Linux approaches 10/10 too. There’s a reason argumentum ad popularum is a fallacy.
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Yes, I don’t want to use that distro-agnostic resource hog flatpak. Better than snap for sure, but I still don’t have countless gigabytes of storage for countless versions of whole operating systems to run this and that app. No, storage is not cheap, at all, especially when you don’t even have the physical space for it.