Maybe I need to reconsider Pop OS. Last time I tried they shipped with a broken kernel, but that's probably fixed now.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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If stability is a concern, Mint has been great for me
I've been using Mint with Cinnamon for quite some time on my home PC. I wanted to try something different on my notebook.
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 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.
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?
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.
Snap is portable to other distros, look at the official website and you see a list of distros, you can use snap on. That doesn't mean that there is no vendor lock-in, just a different kind. Snap as a format grew out of Cannonicals effort in the mobile field. Snaps where supposed to be the truly convergent successor to click, the packaging format used by Ubuntu Touch. And this history is baked into its DNA. It's right there on the snapcraft website: "The app store for Linux". As such Cannonical has always courted proprietary software and/or software by big companies (VS Code was first released as a snap for a reason). I think that they have always have had an eye on one day adding app payments and the sweet, sweet 30% cut they can take from every sale
The sandbox requires apparmor, so doesn’t work on anything else by default except OpenSUSE I think.
Solus and Manjaro are shipping Snap installed by default and I've never had a problem installing snapd on fedora. All I ever had to do for that was run a single standard dnf install. Apparmor doesn't pose the problem you think it does
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
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.
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-core
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?