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.
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
Canonical also sells private Snaps repos for a shy amount of 30 000$ per year
https://www.nitrokey.com/news/2021/nextbox-why-we-decided-and-against-ubuntu-coreYes, it’s good that they make money with such services. Services like hosting are a great way.
It could be like the old RPM vs DEB arguments. Technically, one could have argued at the time that RPM was explicitly singled out in the Linux Standard base.
However, these days, DEB certainly feels more common (although, from my understanding, Redhat/Slack is big in enterprise, so i’m not actually sure which is more common).
Except both RPM and DEB are fully open-source. Flatpak is open-source, Snap is partly proprietary.
Time to change distro.
I’m kinda baffled people would jump ship because of this matter
Snaps have been a thing for 7 years and before that Canonical did similar really weird things (Amazon shopping lense a decade ago anyone?)anyone who really cares already uses something else
the first thing I did with Ubuntu is uninstall all snaps and stores. it was an option, soon it wont be.
It’s just because I’m a newbie – having been using Linux for one year, and started with Ubuntu simply because that was shipped ready with my laptop. I haven’t found the time to try any other distro yet, because of work & lack of time.
Indeed I remember I was thinking about moving to Linux years ago, exactly when the Amazon-Ubuntu craziness happened, so I thought “some other time”.
Regarding snap & flatpak: I simply don’t like the redundancy philosophy behind them.
If it works, don’t switch distros. There’s always an OS which does sth. better.
That’s also true! Sometimes out of curiosity I might explore with "live cd"s rather than really reinstalling a distro.
Trying sth new is never a bad idea. From live cd’s, over vm’s or distrobox containers, it makes you more comfortable in switching between environments.
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
Classic canonical move: Take community software, force snaps into it and then ship it.
Yep, I can not understand why Canonical keep pushing snaps on desktop
Because maintaining snaps is a lot less work for whoever maintains the package, upstream developers, volunteers, or Canonical. If I’m shipping software for Ubuntu and I can use snap, I sure as hell will use it instead of deb.
Because they something to lock you in to Ubuntu. They want Ubuntu to be the only thing that uses snaps. They want to get snaps to be an Ubuntu exclusive feature, and once they can start convincing some random closed source devs to ship in only the snap format they have a hook to keep you on Ubuntu. And they want those random random closed source devs to be focused on more of the corporate world so they can sell some support licenses.
Snap is easily available on other distros as well. If anything, they want to lock you into their proprietary store.
‘Classic canonical corporate move’…there I fixed it for you.
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.
Maybe I need to reconsider Pop OS. Last time I tried they shipped with a broken kernel, but that’s probably fixed now.
Looks like Ubuntu will be going the way of Reddit
deleted by creator
More reasons not to use Ubuntu 😁
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.
Honestly not sure why it matters, provided the store is full. Both are similar to end users
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.
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.
That’s why I left for MX Linux.
