Listen, I don't even like Flatpaks, but at least they're multi-platform and non-proprietary.
But the original poster is probably of the opinion that "pro-consumer" means something that "just works", and if it's a walled garden, so what?
"Why is there barbed wire at the top of that wall?" "Don't worry about it."
That would be a somewhat valid argument if Snaps "just worked" any better than Flatpaks. That has not been my experience.
Given the choice between an open standard and a proprietary one, the proprietary one damn well better have meaningful technological advantages. I don't see that with Snaps. All I see is a company pouring effort into a system whose only value is that they are pouring effort into it. They should put that effort into something better.
Granted, it's been a few years since I used Ubuntu and Snaps. Perhaps things have improved. It was nothing but headaches for me. A curse upon whoever decided to package apps that obviously require full file system access as Snaps. "User-friendly", indeed.
From an enterprise/server perspective, when what you're really paying for is first-party support, I guess Snaps make more sense. But again, that effort could be put toward something more useful.
I keep expecting them to die like Unity DE
Genuinely curious: what don't you like about flatpaks?
I find that flatpaks are quite awesome, because you can have any distro, while all apps continue to work (but I'm also not a dev or anything, so don't know about that side of the story).
Duplication of resources mainly. Bloat upon bloat. Worse, a Flatpak can ignore things that it probably should use on the system, and I'm not sure that's a good thing.
Don't get me wrong, there are supposed "bare metal" installs that duplicate all sorts of things too, and I don't like it when that happens either. Steam, for example, keeps at least one extra copy of itself as well as a bunch of other things.
And there's that Flatpaks an entirely different ecosystem that require their own set of updates.
I get it. I understand there are benefits. Doesn't mean I like it.
That's stupid. Nothing stops you from just installing regular Ubuntu if you love snaps so much.
Or just installing Snap afterwards
corporate linux apologists promoting proprietary ecosystems are still corporate apologists promoting proprietary ecosystems
Wonderfully put! Thanks.
I think a lot of the flak directed towards snap would be mitigated if they made the backend open source. I know there are some efforts to produce alternative backends (although the one I knew about lol / lol-server seems to have gone dark).
Another issue is Canonical's rather strong armed and forceful approach to making people use snaps rather than the OSs native packaging system, again, not something that should be an issue in theory but when people already have a negative view of the format to start with...
Personally I don't really have an issue with Snaps. I've had more luck with them and fewer issues than Flatpaks (which I also tend to avoid like the plague) but that is probably just because I prefer to use appimages or native packages rather than having to fight the sandbox permissions and weird things it can do to apps that don't take Snaps and Flatpaks properly into account.
Yeah I wouldn't hate snaps if it wasn't for canonical saying they wouldn't force them on people, then making apt install snaps instead of .debs without the user asking for it.
They won't open source snaps because they want to control the snap ecosystem to make money off of it for an IPO
I wonder if it probably wouldn't (or at least wouldn't have) done any harm to do so seeing as if you look at Flatpak, its most obvious comparison, although it can have multiple remotes, Flathub is the only one that is realistically used and is the de-facto standard.
The more snaps you have, the slower your machine will boot. It's uniquely shit technology that should die already.
Anti-Snap is pro-consumer. Using Ubuntu at all is anti-consumer, I would rather Mint or just Debian.
That's an interesting comment from a guy that used to work for Canonical, and then went anti-snap pretty hard, to the point that he made this:
lol, love that
No see he loves snaps so much he made a utility to unistall it To reinstall it again!
Yeah no snaps are a bad format they are not FOSS in my book.
I don't think he knows what "anti-consumer" means
That's one of the dumbest things I ever heard
Not wanting to elect dictators is anti-democracy!
Basically the same logic
I'll be honest with y'all. If your decision to not buy something from a hardware manufacturer is based on that they've modified their optional Ubuntu install, this hardware wasn't for you to begin with
That was my thought initially as well. Just install the OS you want, how you want.
There already is Flatpak. Many proprietary apps are shipped as Snaps, which helps with Flatpak packaging as the binaries can just be packed into a different container.
Snap developers kinda help with making the whole portals, isolated apps stuff work.
But thats about it.
The Venn diagram of supported apps isn't also a perfect circle. You can't run VPNs as Flatpaks, and Flathub disallows CLI apps from being submitted (because the UX of using a sandboxed CLI app sucks). Snap doesn't have these issues.
because the UX of using a sandboxed CLI app sucks
I think it is more because of this issue because as far as I know snaps have some level of sandbox and you can still use CLI apps as you said.
Very interesting read, thanks for the link. This seems like a major shortcoming of flatpak!
Yeah that's solidly it. I use strictly confined CLI snaps all the time. (In fact, I maintain the snaps for a couple of CLI apps.) They work fine as long as the snap has the right plugs.
But I don't want to have to run flatpak run dev.htop.htop to get to htop.
No there are many CLI apps on Flathub.
Helix, and others.
Helix opens it's own GUI when you run it. It's not a CLI app in the same sense as git. I'm curious on the others you mention, since as a packager, I've seen firsthand CLI apps being declined (or allowed, but only with a hidden status on flathub.org)
Interesting. Yes I had some other editor too, it opened a new terminal tab.
There is some flatpak export bin directory where the binaries are, I think you can put that to your PATH and have a pretty good CLI experience.
I think it's a short term vs long term debate. In the short term snaps are nice. They might help you get that software you want right now. In the long term though, it will only take away some of your rights and make you into a product.
There are also some interesting things to say about wording. Specifically consumer vs user. Software is not consumed, it's used and depending on the specific software, the user might be abused by the people producing and controlling the software.
I think that phrases like 'anti-consumer' can stick to any target, so long as they're thrown with a sufficient amount of bullshit.
Can you link the original quote? I feel like there is a lot of context missing here.
Judge Tuxedo's reasonings here: https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Infos/Help-Support/Frequently-asked-questions/Why-does-TUXEDO-OS-not-support-Snap-.tuxedo
I think I now know where I'll order my next computer from.
Guy called me a nerd just for pointing out Tuxedo even explains on their website how to install snap.
It made a lot of sense after seeing he used to work at Canonical, lol.
Wow, I didn't know Canonical apologist is a thing.
The difference comes when they actively *block* installation (just like Mint does).
Dude's anti-Mint as well. From a different comment, seems like he works (or worked) for Ubuntu.
You know what seems more anti-consumer to me? Trash-talking your competition for making different choices to you with your FOSS they're legally allowed to re-distribute with any changes they like.
It's almost like if people don't prefer those changes or something then they won't be popular? Oh wait, Mint is hugely popular...
Snap annoys the piss outta me because of the forced updates. That said, never ever had a snap package not work for me. Whereas installing some things from apt just doesn't work for whatever reason.
Are you refering to this comment?
https://mastodon.social/@popey/112591863166141029
@bytebro Yeah, their butchered Ubuntu install, and anti-snap stance is anti-consumer.
My guess at the stance is I'd imagine it's that switching away from snaps is switching away from Ubuntu's support and security monitoring and updates to some less known/reliable/diligent third party?
Popey (Alan Pope) used to work for Canonical / Ubuntu, so he's presumably not inclined to jump on the bandwagon of Canonical/Ubuntu/snap hate since he knows a lot of Canonical and Ubuntu people and their motivations and work. Not that there aren't good reasons to criticize snap or other Canonical decisions, but it's also plain that a lot of people just join a hate bandwagon and don't even know what about it they object to. There is masses of wrong-headed criticism of Canonical out there e.g. I've frequently seen people criticize creating Upstart, saying Canonical should have used systemd, or bzr vs git! Presumably these people were annoyed at Canonical for not inventing a time machine.
You don't have to install Ubuntu on those laptops. I don't really understand his point. He wants snaps?
I have a standing fatwa on snap only because it comes installed and enabled by default on Ubuntu server. Maybe it's good for grandmas laptop but it's kill-on-sight in a server environment. Every Ubuntu server I've seen has eventually been taken offline without any warning because of snapd doing some auto update.
Ubuntu server should have snapd disabled. Ubuntu shouldn't be the default distro for VPS providers. AFAIK its only the default because its the distro most people might have prior experience with.
While I'm at it, Fedora is also on my shit list as dnf requires over a gig of memory to do a major version upgrade.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0