Canonical has officially announced the stability of its Steam Snap for ARM64 devices. Initially introduced in January, the snap has undergone extensive testing on various ARM64 hardware including the NVIDIA DGX Spark, Radxa Orion O6, and Lenovo ThinkPad X13s, showing promising performance across popular games.
Since Valve has yet to release a native ARM Linux client, Canonical has bundled the Intel/AMD Steam binary with the FEX emulator to provide an alternative. The newly stable version allows users to access FEX’s configuration options, such as library forwarding toggles. According to software engineer Mitchell Augustin from Canonical, these options are tailored to different games and platforms, which is why they are not enabled by default.
The Steam Snap for ARM is regularly updated and can be installed via the Ubuntu App Center or through the terminal with the command:
sudo snap install steamAfter installation, users can sign in to Steam and start downloading games. However, users should be aware that this project is unofficial and maintained by Canonical, not Valve. Consequently, performance may vary, especially on older, low-powered ARM devices like single-board computers.
For any problems encountered while using the Canonical Steam Snap for ARM64, users should report issues on the project’s GitHub page.