Tldr: the new store only supports snaps, deb support will come later. OP, please provide summary next time if you link to clickbait articles.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Ok, note taken 👍
Or this time as both title and summary can be edited.
Deb support will come later, but:
If the same piece of software exists in the Ubuntu repository and the snap store the new store will only make it possible to install the snap version.
So the title is on point IMO.
It's not a click bait per se. Even after deb support they will use only snap for applications that has a snap package and only debs if it hasn't got any snap package afaik.
BUT, the "new" store is based on a community project which ALREADY supports both deb and snap.
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.
Sooo they have ADHD and suffer with hyperfixation with the rest of us ADHDers?
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that convergent phone thing
Tbf I think convergence could be the killer feature which pushes mobile Linux into large-scale adoption. Also Purism has its Librem 5 phone as convergent, too. It's not just Canonical.
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There's a benefit to Canonical, the corp that maintains Ubuntu, which is that while snaps are open source tech, the server for the snap store is closed source and snap can't be configured to point at another store.
In other words, it's about centralized control.
There are some advantages to the tech itself, like live auto-updating, which is good for security-critical server apps, but over all I'm not a fan.
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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-core
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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.
Flatpaks are so much better than snaps. There's nothing that Snaps can do that Flatpaks can't do better, aside from CLI tools. But CLI tools should just be in Docker anyways.
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because they won't need to maintain it, they won't even need to maintain the dependencies, some guy online will maintain the package and it's dependency for them, whether it's updated or not, it's going to launch, that's the whole point of those style of packaging
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.
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do they get funding from hardware vendors? snaps use a lot more resources
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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.
All the servers I've spun up in the past few years have been Debian instead of my usual Ubuntu.
The last straw was kinda when I learned that installing docker via the install menu gives you the snap version instead of the normal one, with no indication that this is the case.
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Maybe I need to reconsider Pop OS. Last time I tried they shipped with a broken kernel, but that's probably fixed now.
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.
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The big difference is that Snap is partially proprietary. For those who like Linux for its free and open-source nature and all the benefits that confers, this is an unfortunate evolution that has a negative impact on the Linux ecosystem.
And snap has other issues, such as it's very badly implemented. No sane person wants to see 100s of lop devices mounted on lsblk all the time.
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
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Looks like Ubuntu will be going the way of Reddit
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?
A big issue for me with snap is, that the server side software is proprietary. So it really really does feel like they are trying for lock-in
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Ubuntu / Canonical were working on Snap for some years when Flatpak came on the scene. They've been shipping Ubuntu bits using it since 2016. In addition to the legacy, Snap is more versatile than Flatpak in that it can be used to package pretty much anything, including system bits. It's also had a secure sandbox from the start. Changing to Flatpak would be a functionality downgrade for Canonical and Ununtu maintainers using Snap. In addition Flatpak can be used along with Snap on Ubuntu so there's no need to not use both for whoever finds that useful. Snap lets Ubuntu ship software using less work, which means more up-to-date bits in Ubuntu. Users can install other software via Snap or Flatpak, whichever they find more useful.
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.
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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?
- They kinda suck. They take a long time to launch
- They are in practice proprietary to Ubuntu so they are not really FOSS
- The draw of Ubuntu it is was based on Debian Testing and therefor pretty stable.
- It's Yet Another Containerization stack. We already have flatpack, app image, chroot jails and more.
Why would a serious user want a psuedo proprietary Nth app containerization platform that sidesteps a serious incubation chain and has poor performance?
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.
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