There are many reasons one could choose to hate Snap packages, and this not one of them. It's like hating a webbrowser because it spawns 20 processes that (the horror) you would all see when you run ps. It's just a part of how container technologies work.
This is truly why I also hate snaps though. The snapd people and the mount people need to work out how to hide these by default.
Try it in enterprise where you have automated systems that deploy alert sensors and they instantly go off because each mount is 100% full.
I think Snap has the potential to be better than Flatpak. It's a real sandbox instead of the half-assed shit Flatpak has going on. The problem I have with Snap is that Canonical keeps the Server closed-source. I don't want a centralized app store where Canonical can just choose to remove apps they don't like. So as long as the Server is closed-source, I will stay on Flatpak
Is Flatpak not a container system?
Kind of? Maybe?
It has similar goals to something like docker, but goes about it very differently, and it's obviously meant for user-facing applications.
You wouldn't use docker to install steam, but you can use flatpak.
I asked the question because of the label "half-assed" that the commenter above me put on Flatpak. I do not know much about snap, Flatpak and how they differ (other than the fact that both are used as containerisation technologies for desktop apps and the former is by Canonical), and why Flatpak is necessarily worse that snap (by what metric? System performance? Storage?)
That and these damn annoying loop devices.
Go restart your browser in the middle of the day because snap just updated it in the background.
Why I hate snaps/flatpak:
snap/flatpak >500mb
Don't know about Snap, but Flatpak download sizes decrease significantly after installing the main platform libraries, they can become really small; of course that's pretty much fully negated if you're installing Electron apps, but even then 500MB isn't very accurate, more like 150MB on average
flatpak run com.very.easy.to.remember.and.type.name
Yes I hate it, what is even more annoying is that you can do flatpak install someapp and it will search matches on its own, it shows them to you to let you decide, but after that you can't do flatpak run someapp because it "doesn't exist"
Appimage literally requires more storage for the apps because it dublicates all dependencies so in terms of storage flatpak and dnaps win by FAR, there are valid reasons to criticize all three but your comment is a sad joke!
snap/flatpak >500mb
And to make it worse, snap keeps copies of previous versions of all programs. Which can be good if you need to roll something back, but at least last time I used Ubuntu it didn't provide any easy way to configure retention or clean up old snaps.
Runtimes are okay, the problem is there is no runtime package manager and often you have like 7 of them, which is horrible. But on modern hard drives also no problem.
Appimages cant be easily ran from terminal, you need to link then to your Path.
For Flatpak I made a tool that aliases their launch commands to be very easy.
Appimages cant be easily ran from terminal, you need to link them to your Path.
On many distros "~/.local/bin" is already in PATH, that's where I put my appimages, then make them executable and it just works.
On the plus side, snaps also crap your system log full of petty little AppArmor events. And when snap gets its permissions wrong, you can easily fix it with SnapSeal.
(If Flatpak would just fucking stop rewriting every file path as /var/run/1000/blah, it would be the unquestionably superior package tech)
Friction between Snap and AppArmor is to be expected. The corporate sponsor of Snap, Canonical, is well known for their icy relationship with the corporate sponsor of AppArmor, Canonical.
That's why I moved to fedora recently...didn't like to see 30 or so mounted filesystems every time I did an fdisk -l to mount some disk
Luckily Debian is upstream of Ubuntu.
Don't use it - vote with your feet :)
Leave ubuntu behind. Their snap fixation is toxic.
Sigh, I was a sysadmin on my own system from 1999-2008 and on a busy server from 2008-2012... then essentially quit. Now with flatpak and snaps it seems I have no idea what I am doing.
Flatpaks aren't very relevant for servers if I am not wrong but Canonical definitely tties to push Snaps for that usecase, I feel like other container technologies like Docker or Podman are a lot more relevant in that context and containerization in general is really nice especially for server use and not that hard to wrap your head around! ;)
Yeah, that's really what I haven't used that seems significant these days - Docker. I used to use VMs a fair bit including the premade ones from MS for IE testing, which I think (?) are the same concept.
Switching to Gentoo has been the best. If I don't want something I just blacklist it in my make.conf. getting errors from an odd package? Blacklist. Don't want systemd or gnome software? Blacklist. It's great. My shit runs insanely fast and my system only breaks when I explicitly do something stupid, and it's usually just one minor adjustment away from getting fixed.
I take the unconditional and mandatory creation of ~/snap as a middle finger to all users. Fuck snap
thats why i prefer/like flatpak
They also kill performance if you're still using a hard drive as your system drive. I know we should all be using SSDs, it's 2023, but sometimes it's not always possible
Thankfully the OS/app drive is an SSD. The rest are spinners though. Just for low bandwidth storage.
I don't like snaps, but dude... Do you even know what fstab is?
IIRC, it is a C runtime function that stabs a file.
It is actually the secure version that requires you to specify a buffer length of the old insecure ftab function that is in half a dozen standards that counted the lines indented by tabs in a file. Of course they didn't change the fact that it just writes the result number as a string into an output buffer instead of returning an integer because that would make it less portable to operating systems which still use the insecure standard version.
That would be the same of hating docker because it creates networks. It's just how it's sandbox works.
Yeah, there are reasons to criticize snaps but the fact that it takes a lot of space in some UI is not really one of them.
Oh my god I hate this, I had no idea
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Snap, but tbh "it exposes the UI and UX weaknesses of other apps" isn't really a good one
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