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.
Why is Ubuntu pushing snaps so hard? Is there objectively a benefit to them apart from Flatpak?
It seems like an odd hill to die on.
Canonical is just weird like that, it seems. They tend to pick something and fixate on it really hard (Eg. Unity desktop, Mir, that convergent phone thing, now Snaps) and work on it until it’s almost really good, then they get fixated on the next shiny thing and dump whatever they were doing to go chase that instead.
They’re the Google of Linux.
How so?
They bring their projects about 80% to the point of being good, then let them stall while they focus on the next new thing. Later the project may be suddenly cancelled.
The worst page from the Google and Microsoft playbook
Giving up on Unity was a shame
Snaps are used for Ubuntu’s IOT distro, and also for their upcoming immutable desktop. They even ship kernel and mesa as snap, which makes updating less likely to break a system (in case of a crash while updating, user error, …).
That’s why they push snap. Canonical doesn’t mainly aim to make a apps available to all distros like flatpak does. Just like now where all distros need their own packages, snap will coexist with other package formats.
For the user it’s unimportant how apps are installed, as long as they’re available.
Because they controll snaps. Their backend is proprietary and they do not support any other way of distribution.
Now there are some objective benefits to Snaps compared to Flatpaks, at least so I was told. Apparently they offer significantly better documentation and integrate more tightly with the system, allowing you to do more stuff with them.
This was a while back tho, I don’t know where Flatpak stands today
deleted by creator
Except both RPM and DEB are fully open-source. Flatpak is open-source, Snap is partly proprietary.
Time to change distro.
The Fedora software app has been promoting flatpaks over native packages, even not displaying that native packages are available even if they are, requiring the command line tool to access some native packages. So I don’t see how this is fundamentally different.
The fundamental difference is that flatpak is a good system, adopted by many distributions.
Snap sucks and only Ubuntu uses it.
They’ll do like their Unity UI, wait many years until they realize their mistake then drop it.
IIRC Flatpack is also FOSS whereas the Snap server software is proprietary
The big difference is that Snap is partially proprietary. For those who like Linux for its free and open-source nature and all the benefits that confers, this is an unfortunate evolution that has a negative impact on the Linux ecosystem.
Ubuntu is getting on my last nerve. At this point I’m going Debian on everything except Thinkpad, but only because it’s Nvidia based and Pop!_OS just works on it.
All the servers I’ve spun up in the past few years have been Debian instead of my usual Ubuntu.
The last straw was kinda when I learned that installing docker via the install menu gives you the snap version instead of the normal one, with no indication that this is the case.
More reasons not to use Ubuntu 😁
Looks like Ubuntu will be going the way of Reddit
deleted by creator
Yeah, nah, that’s a dealbreaker for me. I’m back to LMDE when this happens.
I don’t mind having snaps available but I’d avoid using them whenever possible. They’re larger than necessary, slower than necessary, and I trust software checked by its original devs plus distro maintainers more than software checked by the devs alone.
Why do Linux nerds that care about this sort of stuff hate snaps so much?
Is it the concept of snaps / flatpaks that is the issue or snaps specifically because Canonical is behind them?
I know literally nothing about how they work except I installed the VLC snap and it’s fine.
I couldn’t install Parsec (a remote desktop game streaming app) because of a missing dependency (an old version of lib-something codec that wasn’t in my newer version of Ubuntu). I spent like an hour trying to figure out how to take the 18.04 version and add it to 22.10. I don’t know Linux at all so I wasn’t making much progress. Someone, not the developers of Parsec, made a flatpak and it magically worked.
I was afraid that because the flatpak was made by some random guy I couldn’t really trust it. I looked inside the flatpak and it’s seems to be nothing except for the Parsec deb coming straight from the official Parsec URL and that libcodec thing that was causing a problem.
So from my perspective, not knowing the technical details or politics, what’s the problem?
The snap store is proprietary, flatpaks handle the graphical app space better, OCI containers handle the service space better, and really high reported load times.
Flatpaks are awesome IMHO.
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.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
Agreed. I would have like Ubuntu to come with flatpak, but snap exists for longer than flatpak and has additional use cases. Snap allows to do app packaging and even the rest of the system. Fedora uses rpm-ostree + flatpak instead.
Ubuntu and Snaps are the cancer of the Linux world. :)
Snaps I get, but Ubuntu? Aside from an asinine application process to get hired a Canonical, they did a lot to push for a more straightforward Linux desktop experience. Their time has passed, but cancer is a bit too much for me, considering all the fantastic offshoots.
Context: I came to Ubuntu from Gentoo. Debian before that and a brief flirt with the hot fantastic mess that was Mandrake when I first discovered Linux.
Snaps is just the latest controversial tech they haved pushed for. They have a long history of pushing for things they have created that people don’t want or don’t want their implementation of (like upstart or the original unity desktop env). Or pushing for stuff before it is ready (like pulseaudio).
Nothing wrong with pushing for your own tech, but they do seem to miss the mark a lot on what they want to introduce. And keep upsetting the community over it.
There is a problem with pushing tech if that tech is proprietary — such as with Snaps.
Unity I don’t think was ever that controversial, except that Ubuntu was sending all desktop search queries to Amazon at one point, which was, of course, terrible privacy-wise. The reason why Unity died is because Ubuntu decided it’s not worth the money to maintain it.
There was a lot of community backlash when they first released unity as its own thing. Lots of people hated it because it was very different from what came before. That is what made it controversial.
That’s why I left for MX Linux.
