I really enjoy snaps, they gave vastly improved. It's great having the greatest and latest without to use PPAs and breaking my system.
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Ubuntu Linux
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I'm pretty new with ubuntu, but it seems that softwares through deb packages are still way more fast that snap.
A mix of misinformation, some bugs and a lot of strong feelings.
Because back in the day when Ubuntu was at it's prime especially when I first used in on my journey Into Linux 12 years ago it was never enforced and now it's like ubuntu just wants to push snaps on people for no reason
Why Canonical thinks Snaps are a good thing:
saves time for the maintainers: build one image and it works on 4 LTS releases plus current release, isolate tool changes between OS and app.
ability to update app independently of rest of apps and OS (avoid dependency hell, keep OS stable).
sandboxing.
ability to install multiple versions of app in same system.
ability to run same image on desktop, server, and IoT systems.
provides an app-update or even kernel-update mechanism for IoT systems, which often do not have one.
if image is built by original app devs, a simpler faster connection between users and original app devs, for updates and bug-reporting.
single-store model is familiar to potential new users of Linux, who already use that model on Android iOS Firefox Chrome VS Code etc.
single-store model arguably is more secure than adding N PPA's to your software-sources list.
The snap store is also a walled garden made by canonical.
they want control over the user, to protect the inept user from themselves, to reduce frustration and possibly support workload
same concept as Apple or any other company that aims prioritizes having a WIDE target audience
Ubuntu used to be amazing but I had to move on especially since I'm a much more advanced user now
Once the companies start taking control of these distros they go to 💩.
Just look at what happened to Manjaro, in my opinion Manjaro is the most beautiful Linux distro to look at and it was very well done but then the corporate a** hats started taking over and Manjaro has some very sketchy business practices and has broken the AUR even for all Arch users who want nothing to do with Manjaro
I think, the Linux ecosystem has changed a lot. There is far more support for it, than it used to have. With more software coming to your computer, it's harder to find out, which programms are trustworthy. I think it's a good idea to put programms into a secure box and only allow access to the system in a controlled way. That is what snap makes possible.
Canonical needed that feature for their business clients and private users benefit from that.
My main reason is that it's built for a single package repository -- basically making it a separate garden.
I mean you can change the "store", but let's say you do: then you cannot install packages from the first repo as you can only have one repository active at a time. And because Canonical's is the largest, it's not very feasible to provide an alternative.
Btw, can you find out how its changed? Last time I checked it wasn't too easy.
Contrast this with flatpak where basically anyone can provide packages. There are no walls between repos. It's the intended use case.
Indeed to me it seems Canonical is aspiring to become the appstore for Linux with Snap whereas flatpak implements the values of open source community, not monopolistic ones. I don't know of any technical benefits Snap has over Flatpak; perhaps there are some?
Though if I have some misconseptions about Snap, I'm happy to be educated :).