A new ‘app store’ is expected to ship as part of Ubuntu 23.10 when it’s released in October — and it’ll debut with a notable change to DEB support.
A new ‘app store’ is expected to ship as part of Ubuntu 23.10 when it’s released in October — and it’ll debut with a notable change to DEB support.
I’ve been using more and more flatpaks lately on arch and fedora based distros, i have no idea how snaps compare but seems similar? Seems an odd push from Ubuntu, but could make more sense than deb packages for non techy users perhaps?
Ubuntu / Canonical were working on Snap for some years when Flatpak came on the scene. They’ve been shipping Ubuntu bits using it since 2016. In addition to the legacy, Snap is more versatile than Flatpak in that it can be used to package pretty much anything, including system bits. It’s also had a secure sandbox from the start. Changing to Flatpak would be a functionality downgrade for Canonical and Ununtu maintainers using Snap. In addition Flatpak can be used along with Snap on Ubuntu so there’s no need to not use both for whoever finds that useful. Snap lets Ubuntu ship software using less work, which means more up-to-date bits in Ubuntu. Users can install other software via Snap or Flatpak, whichever they find more useful.
Snap is very similar just not portable to most other distros. It makes a lot of sense both for users and for vendor lock-in.
In my experience, performance of snap apps is just abhorrent. The consume a huge amount of disk space and, whether it’s due to that or not, they have extremely long load times.
Principles aside, this just makes them unusable for me. I use flatpak when there’s no other option, but strive to use deb either natively or through PPA.