I vote to kill snap
this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2024
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Linux
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I can’t believe they used this as a pro for their distro…
I am currently only on Linux on my Steam Deck and I do have two RPi's (though I don't actively use them) so I don't have personal current knowledge of differences between Snap, Flatpak, and App Image beyond that A: Snap always brings up lots and lots of hate in comments and B: is from Canonical.
But is it possible that they might choose to use Snap for having more program options due to Ubuntu being such a "mainstream" distro? I know lots and lots of programs do release Flatpaks, but are there more of them or does Snap have more? Real question since I am aware of how heated some threads get with folks being really "fuck Snap" or "it is fine." Mostly just curious since I am more and more likely to move my main PC to Linux as my main OS after Windows 10 is dead.
Snap doesn't just bring lots of hate in comments it also brings a lot of bloat in your system which is a big no in Linux community. Another thing is canonical is going out of their way to force snap. In Ubuntu even if you do apt install it is installing snap packages.
I'm not sure if there are more snap packages than flatpaks or .deb/.rpm but most Linux users are competent enough to either add custom repos or follow simple build instructions to build from source.
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I don't like Snap too, but it has some advantages over Flatpak. And unfortunately the most popular distribution still uses Snap. In example it is easier to create Snap packages ~~and Flatpak does not support CLI only applicatoins~~ ( Edit: my bad ) , but Snap does (something like grep in example). Also some may like it more that Snap relies on AppArmor instead using the custom solution of Flatpak.
All in all, its not like black and white which is better. I still wish only one of the formats would exist, because this is not the kind of fragmentation I wish to have. But both exist and the end user should decide which of them to kill.
Flatpak does not support CLI only applicatoins
Where does that misinformation come from? That's not the first time I've heard it. Was that actually true at one point?
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It says possibly snap, so we can hope...
What is so hated about snaps? I’ll admit I haven’t used Ubuntu since they started using snaps, but I don’t understand the hate about them in the Linux community.
The place to get snaps is proprietary and exclusive.
Oh… yeah I see the issue.
I use Karch, btw.
Burn Snap out of there and I'm in.
Edit: looks like they're not putting much towards snaps, it's mostly Flatpak and systemd-sysext. I'm good with that.
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This article is far too hypey. One dude has started this initiative and needs people to work on his concept to get it off the ground. I'm not opposed to a red-hat free immutable system, but this one is so far from maturity this article is selling a first drawing like an almost finished product. Remind me in two years how this went.
Harald, the main architect behind it is already running it as his daily driver. Many others (myself included) are already testing it in VMs and on spare hardware with only very minor papercut issues to be resolved.
Sounds great! I'll have a look once the user infrastructure is in place.
The distro is designed to be a bulletproof, highly user-friendly operating system that showcases the best of KDE technology—a system that KDE can confidently recommend to casual users and hardware manufacturers.
So it looks like there will finally be a distribution that Windows, Mac, and ChromeOS users can jump to and just start using without having to learn much and with a much better and more familiar GUI than GNOME.
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Ooo damn that sounds exactly what I'd like to try.
On the other hand I feel like I'm too old for this shit. My system works fine, I understand everything, and things rarely break and never in an unrecoverable way.
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Maybe they'll fix the sddm custom theming? It's currently broken on all immutables and doesn't allow custom themes.
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I thought we all agreed that "immutable" is a confusing term and that we should call it "atomic"
edit: I was wrong
What does atomic mean in this sense? That seems more confusing than immutable.
It means a change either applied completely and successfully, or not at all (think "atomic transactions" in databases).
Atomic in software refers to an operation that cant be interrupted because it happens in one step. This one of the big selling points of atomic or immutable distros. Your system will not be left in a broken state by cancelling an update because updates do not take multiple steps, unlike traditional distros.
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I disagree, because they are not the same thing.
Immutable means read only root.
Atomic means that updates are done in a snapshotted manner somehow. It usually means that if an update fails, your system is not in a half working state, but instead will be reverted to the last working state, and that updates are all or nothing.
I create a btrfs snapshot before updates on my Arch Linux system. This is atomic, but not immutable.*
There is also "image based" which distros like ublue (immutable, atomic) are, but Nixos (also immutable and atomic) are not.
*only really before big updates tbh, but I know some people do configure snapshits before all updates.
Who said that?
Fedora has pushed for the change by rebranding their immutable distros as Fedora Atomic Desktops, and these are likely the most popular immutable distros. Bazzite's homepage also describes the distro as atomic, but never mentions the term immutable.
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Not all. Red Hat started this by naming their immutable distributions with "atomic" (but then not consistently...). Some people agreed, but not everyone.
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Snap WTF?
Ingl, this sounds like exactly the thing I want. Immutability aside, this is how I use EndeavourOS right now, but more sophisticated.
I'm sold on it.
I use Fedora KDE but this one sounds like exactly what I need. I primarily use Linux for software dev and web browsing and Windows for gaming and Office.
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Alright I am installing this
Makes sense that it includes snap given that KDE officially supports their apps packaged as snaps, unlike Gnome.
If I recall correctly, aren’t they going for an Arch base? I assume they’re going to be enabling AppArmor so that the snap sandboxing is mostly working, except for the patches Canonical have failed to upstream so far.
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