Canonical Promotes Steam Snap to Stable on ARM64, With Plans to Rebuild It from Scratch Later

Canonical's Steam snap for ARM64 has been promoted to stable, nearly five months after a call for testing drew feedback from users across a wide range of ARM hardware.

The reason a snap like this exists at all is that Valve's Steam client for Linux is x86-only. To make it run on ARM64, Canonical bundled the x86 Steam binary together with FEX-Emu, a Linux usermode emulator that translates x86 and x86-64 instructions for ARM64 systems at runtime.

This stable release also introduces FEX's library forwarding feature (thunking) as a user-configurable option. Instead of emulating every graphics API call through FEX, thunking forwards OpenGL and Vulkan calls directly to the host system's native ARM64 libraries, which cuts down on emulation overhead.

Canonical has tested this release across three hardware families, all of which are said to have shown good performance across popular games. These include the NVIDIA DGX Spark and associated GB10 devices, Qualcomm Snapdragon laptops (Lenovo ThinkPad X13s, T14s, and Dell XPS 9345), and the Radxa Orion O6 and O6N.

Switch to stable

If you are already running the snap on candidate or edge and want to move to stable, run:

sudo snap refresh steam --channel=stable

They have also laid out a release cycle for the Steam Snap, with new versions first landing in the edge channel for experimental testing, then moving to candidate after around one to two weeks if no major issues surface. From candidate, they graduate to stable after another one to three weeks.

What's next?

Mitchell Augustin, who announced the stable promotion, wants to eventually rebuild the snap around Valve's native ARM64 Steam client and drop the FEX layer Canonical currently maintains on top of it.

Yeah, that native client is already out there, but quietly. ROCKNIX has already shipped it in their distribution, keeping both ARM64 and x86 launch paths available side by side.

Mitchell said he is keeping a close eye on it but is waiting for Proton 11 to exit beta first before making any moves.

For now, you can use the snap on your ARM64 device, and if you run into any issues or want to contribute to development, then the GitHub tracker for this app is the place to go.

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