Something fundamental must have been wrong with your install and you needed to do a total reinstallation of Ubuntu. As personally I had no issues with that, I was able to install the Flatpak for Warehouse and then used Warehouse to install/manage other flatpaks (I prefer that over installing yet another store).
I think it is annoying that Ubuntu software store defaults to snaps, and it is easy to not notice this at first and be mystified why you can’t find normal apt packages.
Also, snap and flatpak packages often have problems that the system version doesn’t have. For example, flatpak Firefox cannot access machines over the local network by their network names (e.g. hostname.local), and that is just a limitation of flatpaks.
The snap for Steam also sucks but it is useable enough at first that I wasted a bunch of time trying to get it to work better, and eventually just installed the .deb the way Valve intended.
Something fundamental must have been wrong with your install and you needed to do a total reinstallation of Ubuntu. As personally I had no issues with that, I was able to install the Flatpak for Warehouse and then used Warehouse to install/manage other flatpaks (I prefer that over installing yet another store).
For me all i had to do was a handfull of commands to get flatpaks to appear in the software store. https://flathub.org/en/setup/Ubuntu
I think it is annoying that Ubuntu software store defaults to snaps, and it is easy to not notice this at first and be mystified why you can’t find normal apt packages.
Also, snap and flatpak packages often have problems that the system version doesn’t have. For example, flatpak Firefox cannot access machines over the local network by their network names (e.g. hostname.local), and that is just a limitation of flatpaks.
The snap for Steam also sucks but it is useable enough at first that I wasted a bunch of time trying to get it to work better, and eventually just installed the .deb the way Valve intended.