Ubuntu brings stable Arm64 Steam Snap to Linux users for improved hardware gaming

Canonical has promoted the Arm64 Steam Snap to the stable channel, using FEX emulation to bring PC gaming to Snapdragon and Nvidia hardware.

Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, has promoted the Arm64 Steam Snap to the Stable channel, giving gaming on the platform a bit of a boost. Before today, this version of the Snap was considered a candidate release, but now anybody can use it with confidence that it will work like other versions of the Steam Snap.

The stable version’s release follows months of testing and user feedback since the initial candidate release in January. For anyone running an Arm-based Linux system, this release will help to lower the barrier to gaming.

The firm behind Ubuntu found the following pieces of hardware to work very well with the Snap during testing:

Nvidia DGX Spark (and GB10 devices)
Qualcomm Snapdragon laptops (eg Lenovo Thinkpad X13s/T14s and Dell XPS 9345)
Radxa Orion O5 and O6N single-board computers

Under the hood, this Snap uses FEX, an X86/x86-64 emulator for Arm64. Users can configure FEX’s options, including its library forwarding (“thunking”) toggles. You can also manually toggle Vulkan, DRM, and GL thunking by editing Config.json. On some hardware, such as Snapdragon and DGX Spark, this can boost game compatibility. Regarding thunking, Canonical said its functionality is heavily game and platform-dependent, so it isn’t enabled by default on all platforms.

Moving forward, the Steam Snap for Arm64 will follow a structured release cadence. The first stop for future versions will be the Edge channel, where users get the latest experimental updates as soon as they’re available. When they’re a bit more stable, they will move to the Candidate channel, assuming no big issues are found internally or by Edge users after 1-2 weeks of testing.

Finally, they land in the Stable channel after spending 1-3 weeks in the Candidate channel, assuming no big issues are found. If you’ve been running the Arm64 Steam Snap and are on the Edge or Candidate channels and want to switch to stable, just run the following command in the terminal: sudo snap refresh steam --channel=stable.

While this news is definitely good for those with Arm64 hardware, it should be noted that this work is not an officially Valve-supported project. Nevertheless, if you want to try it out and give feedback, you can do so via GitHub.