Proprietary doesn't bother me at least not how snap is currently implemented
I don't recall noticing a size difference between snaps and flatpaks
I've found snaps as fast as flatpaks, but I know snaps has issues before I started using them
Honestly, if you’re satisfied, there’s not really a compelling reason to switch. Keep using snaps if that’s what works for you. But I would like to remark that we should preferably support open solutions to proprietary ones. That’s not saying that we should never use proprietary software, but just something to keep in mind.
You had me at proprietary. But seriously, I use FOSS. I’ll tolerate proprietary software if I have absolutely no other choice. There’s absolutely no reason for me to put up with this bullshit. While it’s a long way from the kind of shitfuckery Microsoft is so fond of, it’s still completely unnecessary.
Me reacting to analogies with “Did you know these two things are not completely identical?”, completely unburdened by the knowledge that I’m supposed to explain how the differences invalidate the comparison.
I’d argue it’s pretty stupid to use FOSS but then depend on a proprietary server that only one for-profit company is allowed to run to deliver all that software, trusting them to just never do wrong or leave you high and dry. I’d also argue it fits the analogy perfectly, because the analogy was about saying “I haven’t had a problem yet” in response to being shown the potential problems of the action.
But the problem with snaps is an opinion. If Canonical goes bonkers I'll just go use something else. Until then I don't have any issues with them using proprietary software within their own ecosystem.
It’s not an opinion that proprietary for-profit software will betray you, it is an inevitability. It has happened every single time. If it was FOSS, we could salvage it. It’s proprietary, so we can’t. When it fails it must simply be abandoned. I just hope you learn the right lesson when this happens.
WinRAR will either die, or be sold and squeezed by its new owners. Nobody lives forever and no asset goes unflipped in this market. You can say you won’t update, but that just leaves you vulnerable.
If I were to list every FOSS project that has lasted longer, I’d have to spend all day writing the post. winRAR is unique in that it’s one of the only pieces of long-lasting proprietary software that didn’t die or turn to crap. Such things are not unique or even rare in FOSS.
Flatpak is fine. Snap is Canonical’s proprietary version, which ties you specifically to their app store. It’s not designed to be an open standard but Canonical has made it compulsory in one of the largest distros (Ubuntu) and its derivatives. There are also problems with its sandboxing mechanism competing with AppArmor.
AppArmor and SELinux sandboxing stuff pushed me to only install services with Docker on my headless machines 😣 found out most services can’t write to their own homefolder
This hate comes mostly from Linux communities like here and on Reddit. When you see actual numbers, both are widely used for production use. They have lots of active users as reported in their respective blogs and websites.
That said, it is aware that both had problems. Most hate towards Flatpaks that I can see is from purists that prefer their distro shipping their packages with dynamic dependencies and uprated by their package manager. Also there is complains with outdated runtimes and stuff like how sandboxing works.
Snaps has all problems than before with some extras. When they were released, because of compression, they were painfully slowly to open and they affected boot time. Nowadays this is mostly gone, but they still keep a proprietary store, inability to have multiple repositories (stores) and they don’t respect your home directory structure by placing a “snap” folder in your home.
Personally I use both and I’m happy with them. The proprietary store stuff does not bother me because I’m already trusting canonical binaries by using Ubuntu and they are easy to use and be productive with them.
There was an Ubuntu developer that left Canonical about a year or so ago. His reason was that he had spent a number of years (possibly over a decade, can’t remember) optimizing some code and the kernel to get the fastest boot time possible.
Then he saw Canonical practically throw his work out the window by introducing snaps, which until recently was plagued by serious slowness on the first start of a snap.
He said it felt like his years of work just meant nothing at that point.
There are a number of reasons Flatpaks are a better open source option, even if they aren’t perfect.
Just a few days ago I wrestled with the overzealous sandboxing and security of the Chromium snap. Had to get a Flatpak and even then had to use some flags to get the proper permissions enabled. Next time I do a refresh I’m going with Debian.
With all respect I’d like to ask, why most people in comments avoiding Debian like plague? It’s good OG distro, stable as fuck, i know about old packages and all, but after daily driving arch BTW™ for 5 years straight all i can say is, I’m tired boss, I’m tired of nonstop updating, I’m tired of dependency hell that coming if you didn’t updated your system for half a month, I’m tired of resolving repeating dependency hell when you’ll have to reinstall half of your system to get it work another week, I’m tired of modern filesystems that locking themselves up completely when something goes wrong, so I’m just decided to give Debian a chance, and you wouldn’t believe it, it’s heaven, when you can just power up your system and it just works, without any trouble, yes, i have dated software, but it’s worth it, and yes, 8 years ago, my first distro was Linux mint, and it broke when i used OFFICIAL GUI updater tool to update version of my mint, also I’ve upvoted your comment and don’t mean any bad
Probably different experiences for some people. I don’t currently use my computer for anything time sensitive. I’m studying web development and some minor programming on it and play video games by myself generally. I like to tinker and mess with stuff as well, so Arch and KDE for me is fine. I like getting new features quickly and I don’t need or have a huge desire for the most stable system. If it breaks i just research how i can fix it and I’ve learned a lot doing that. When I do start actually working in development I’ll probably use a more stable release with Gnome. So really just comes down to different strokes for different folks.
Are you me from 8 years ago?) Keep it up) it’ll help you to gain knowledge and as you’ve said someday you’ll want your pc to just work) 8 years ago I’ve started to use Linux and did alot of distro hopping, and 5 years ago i installed arch, and now i trying Debian)
I used Debian for a bit many years ago. It was great for all the reasons you are tired of Arch (I had tried Gentoo before Debian). When Ubuntu came out, I was quite happy with it. It had the stability of Debian, but was a bit more polished and had better support for new stuff without sacrificing stability.
I’m moving on from Ubuntu at this point, and have tried Mint, but not Mint Debian. It’s nice enough. I’m curious what Debian is like these days though. I haven’t used it in a decade at least.
Debian became more polished and user friendly, you can check YouTube reviews of Debian 12, and yes) i think you should try mint Debian first because of mint flavours i only tried standard mint and don’t know how mint Debian edition do
The redundancy is always good, but I really don’t see what benefits the switch would provide. The Linux Mint team removed all the stuff they didn’t like from Ubuntu anyway when packaging it as Linux Mint, and plus, Ubuntu’s software repositories are much more up-to-date than Debian’s owing to their regular release schedule. Unless they want to base LMDE on Debian Sid, anyway.
I am a Linux user for over a decade but I have no idea what this discussion is about. Can someone give me a tldr? I install some software using apt and some using the store and never have any issues.
I believe snaps are only installed by default on Ubuntu at this point. Debian has apt and I don’t think it installs a snap version unless you asked for that.
Snaps are ways to ship software where everything is bundled together and the developer doesn’t need to sort out dependencies on the distribution. This often makes the package bloated. It has no direct benefits for users, but it makes life easier for developers. Thus, indirectly, users might get access to some software they would otherwise need to compile if no one’s got it readily available for the user’s distribution. Ubuntu appears mostly to be using it because they don’t want to bother sorting out dependcies. On Ubuntu, and only on Ubuntu as fast as I know, some packages in apt will install the snap version silently, which, I think rightfully, annoys a lot of users.
There are similar alternatives, like flatpak, which also bundle dependencies. Some aspects of snap are proprietary to Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu, so you’ll find people who are ok with the somewhat bloated software if it makes software more widely available, but aren’t happy with a proprietary format in what is largely an open community.
Package format by Canonical that sandboxes applications and packs them up including all their dependencies. Server side is closed source, thus you can’t implement a local mirror or your own snap store. Many applications are currently sandboxed in a way that makes using them cumbersome, e.g. when your home is on an NFS share.
I can’t even use my smart card because Ubuntu keeps trying to install the snap version of Firefox which can’t access the hardware. Why does it keep swapping out every time I update releases? Why won’t it let me be happy?! /cry
This is exactly why I’m switching to fedora. Just installed 23.10 and Firefox became a snap again. Ive been with ubuntu for over 10 years now, but I’m done.
I think they’re a good way to package apps. Superior to Flatpak for sure. I like Flatpak too and if Canonical abandoned Snap tomorrow, I’d switch my snap-packaged apps to Flatpak. The only non-bullshit downside of Snap is the proprietary server-side and the lack of multi-repo support. I don’t care much about either because I know implementing either is fairly uncomplicated and it will happen should the reason arise. If Debian wanted to start using Snap, it’d take them a month to get the basics working with their own server side. If the client side was proprietary too, I’d have had a completely opposite opinion on Snap. Finally Canonical supplies all the software on my OS. I use third party repos only when absolutely necessary. If Canonical ran a proprietary apt server side, I wouldn’t even know, apt doesn’t care. Some of the myriad HTTP mirrors could easily be running on IIS, or S3, or Nexus. The trust equation for snap is equivalent.
Because you can package and deploy OS components with it. As a result you can build an OS with it, do foolproof updates of it and …gulp, happy tear… rollbackcomponents without involving any other system like a special filesystem.
My bravery comes from being a software guy that’s been doing OS software development for over a decade so I believe my opinion is somewhat informed. 😂 I’m currently working on a software updates implementation for an automotive OS.
I think this is just a difference in the use case. Flatpaks are designed for desktop applications while Snap was initially designed for exactly the purpose you describe.
The initial use case for Snap, when it used to be called Click (circa 2012-13), was mobile apps for Ubuntu Touch. Those were the same as desktop Qt apps, just using the a mobile theme and layout. Canonical developers just had the foresight to create a design that isn’t limited to that use case. As a result Snap is a superset of Flatpak in terms of use cases. Flatpak can probably be rearchitected to match that if anyone cared. If that were the case I’d also be drumming it up.
The funny thing is, we wouldn’t be having any of these discussions over the merits of Snap if RedHat came up with it instead of Canonical and the server side was OSS from the get go. When RedHat was cool that is. In fact likely Canonical would have been using thet too. Just like they use PulseAudio, Systemd, and Wayland.
Tell us you don’t know why you need Single Source of Truth on package installation and content without using the phrase “dependency hell is self-inflicted”.
A single source of truth for software is one way to solve that. There are others with different pros and cons in active use that have shown pretty good results.
What’s your alternative? I’ve used OpenRC before and it was nice, but it didn’t take long to find a use-case that systemd handled easily but OpenRC made difficult. Also a few packages expect systemd to be present and either fail to install or partially install so I had to figure out how to implement the missing functions in OpenRC.
Has the meaning of this template changed? Like isn’t the pink guy supposed to be a thing supporting the white dude so they can accomplish a goal they couldn’t have done alone?
For example, the pink guy could be “Debian”, the white person “Ubuntu”, and the yellow goal “Being an awesome distribution”.
I want to be high and mighty and dislike Snaps for all the technical reasons but the single most irritating thing is definitely all the loopback devices.
I get all the reasons why people hate snaps, and I think they’re all valid. And I appreciate people looking out for others and warning them about problematic software.
But man am I lazy, and I was really happy I didn’t need to set up Docker just to run Sonarr on Bazzite. I’m pretty new to Linux, and that looked like a whole intimidating process.
Snap made me switch back to Debian. Ubuntu was awesome for a long time, but having snap glommed onto everything so much that it kept showing up on my headless boxes was too much.
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