There’s a misunderstanding here. What we mean is that the Snap system itself is proprietary. The server side is proprietary and there’s no way to add repos other than Canonical’s.
Flatpak is open, and anybody can create/add a remote.
Both can be used to package and distribute proprietary software. But the same could be said of .deb or .rpm
Worse performance, particularly in terms of app startup times
Snaps are mounted as separate filesystems, so it can make things look cluttered in your file explorer or when you’re listing stuff with lsblk
Canonical often forces users to use Snaps even when users have explicitly tried to install with apt. e.g. you run sudo apt install firefox and it installs a Snap
It hasn’t gained traction with other distros like Flatpak has, and Canonical’s insistence on backing the “wrong” standard means Linux will continue to be more fragmented than it would be if they also went along with what has become the de facto standard
There are however benefits of snaps. It works for better for terminal programs, and Canonical can even package system stuff like the kernel as a snap - as you can imagine, this might be a very powerful tool when it comes to an immutable version of Ubuntu.
The problem is that each part manufacturer wants you to install their shitty RGB control software that is often bizarrely resource-hogging, and sometimes even used for data gathering.
On laptops, some RGB control software can eat your battery away by a fair bit because the CPU never goes into a lower power state.
RBG should A) all conform to a standardised open API, and B) be off by default.
Remember, people in the US often have to pay a shitload for medication.
But even outside of the US, there’s still the issue of people wanting to steal prescription medicine if you can get high on it/sell it to people who want to get high from it.
There’s been a shift away from putting pills in bottles.
IIRC it was pioneered by the NHS (UK), because they found that the mild inconvenience and time of popping out the pills one by one, in comparison to the ease and speed of downing a whole bottle of them, cut down on people attempting suicide by overdose by a surprising amount.
Ireland has had issues with BSE too, even recently.
In 2020, Irish beef destined for export to china was found to be infected, and it resulted in a 3 year ban on Irish beef imports. In 2023, another case was found, and exports have been stopped again.
There have been ~2000 cases since 2001. Way down from the 90s, but it still exists
Not only that, but they aren’t standardised, and Gnome really likes adhering to standards and staying away from anything they consider unstandardised or janky.
System trays really are a complete clusterfuck.
Sometimes the icons have colour, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they’re minimalist icons, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes you left click on them to do something, sometimes you need to right click, sometimes it’s both, sometimes they have their own menu UI, sometimes they integrate with the system’s, sometimes you can exit an app via them, sometimes you can’t, sometimes they give you notifications, sometimes they just do it through your standard OS notification system, etc.
They are an inconsistent mess. And we all know how anal Gnome can be about UX consistency.
Gnome in the past has expressed a desire for a standardised, cross-desktop system tray that fixes these issues, but tbh I’m sceptical it’d catch on. Not because other desktops wouldn’t get on board, but rather because app developers will just go “meh, we’ll just stick to what we have” and it won’t gain traction.
Considering it uses day then month, 24hr clock, and distance in km, I’m guessing the reason why it’s not “human readable in American” is because it’s intended to be “human readable for pretty much everybody else”
Back in the day, Ubuntu made huge strides in UX and usability, and they’re still riding the coattails of that success even now that they’ve shifted to the corporate sector.
ElementaryOS came out and was super polished, simple, and beautiful. That’s still kinda true, but their small team has meant that they’re now falling behind the likes of Gnome, who’ve set out to do a similar thing.
The Cinnamon desktop is ugly out of the box, but other aspects of UX have been pretty great - everything is simple, they were pioneers in making everything a GUI option, rather than the last 5% of things having to be done in a config file or via terminal.
And finally, Gnome. Extremely polished, consistent, beautiful, and heavily UX-focused. That applies not only to their own system, but also to their third party app ecosystem. Just look at the apps on Gnome Circle - a Gnome project for showcasing apps that nail the Gnome design guidelines. Tell me they don’t look like they have a focus on UX.
Honestly, even MacOS struggles to feel as UX-focused as Gnome, and that’s saying something. UX is like, Apple’s entire schtick. Everything from trackpad gestures to UI elements, subtle animations, etc in Gnome is about UX.
Even KDE Plasma, which is often mocked for being hilariously inconsistent and filled with bizarre clunky UX, has made major strides in the past couple of years, and Plasma 6, releasing very soon, will fix a bunch of fundamental things that currently hold Plasma back from being consistent, and a significant portion of bugs have been fixed - it looks like it won’t be the buggy mess that Plasma 4 and early Plasma 5 was. We’re about to see a major improvement.
IMO the biggest problem is simply that not enough devices are sold with it.
The amount of people who want to/can be arsed to/even know they can install an OS on their PC is pretty small. And even then, most that can will just stick to what they know (this is obviously part of the mindset issue that you speak of).
If mainstream devices were sold with Linux on them, it would get over that hurdle, and also get over the daunting hurdle of “ok I want to switch to Linux, what’s a good distro?” hurdle, to which people online will say everything from Debian to fucking Arch Linux.
Chromebooks (bastardised though they may be) and the Steam Deck prove that Linux isn’t unviable. People just won’t install it of their own volition.
If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us. However, if you change things like stylesheets and icons, you should be aware that you’re in unsupported territory. Any issues you encounter should be reported to the theme developer, not the app developer.
I don’t know whether you’re shitting on theme developers or GTK app developers with your comment, but they explicitly state that they think theming is fine, they’re just tired of people reporting theme problems as app problems. It’s a completely reasonable take.
If I were an app developer I wouldn’t want to open a bug report, then spend hours and hours investigating a reported issue, only to find out that my app was never the problem in the first place.