this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (3 children)

This news shouldn't be a shock to anyone. Ubuntu is just doing what they've been doing all along, and that is trying to push they're snap packages.

As long as distros give people the option/ability to install in other ways I don't see a problem. Now if Ubuntu out right banned any other way to install apps that would be big news.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If you try and use apt to install Firefox, it secretly uses snap anyway. Shit like that is a problem

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

good news is ubuntu is pushing me to flatpaks, those still work

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Yeah, I don't see much wrong with it as long as it works as well as any other installation option and stays maintained.

Interesting thought about banning other installation methods. I can't think of how they'd actually do any of that besides going fully immutable. 🤔

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I've tried a few big apps in flatpak form, and usually they're much bigger, and noticeably (many seconds) slower to start up. (Haven't tried one with less than 4 cores, so can only imagine they being much slower.)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You wanted to say snaps are slower, right?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Well, could've been clearer, my experiences apply to snaps and flatpaks. Huger and slower. And I imagine that on older machines, with fewer cores, slower drives or less ram, possibly unuseable. (Don't know.)

I do know that I'm seeing a lot less 'Electron' - framework apps (FAT and cycles-sucking) being released these days, doesn't seem too popular.

Appimages are easier to install but have only tried a couple. 'Stellarium.appImage' is MUCH slower to load, but OK in operation.

I'd enjoy hearing the -measured numbers- and how many people prefer prefer these FAT formats and why.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Snaps are a great way to:

  • ruin single source of truth for state of installed software
  • .. and contents
  • .. and dependencies (dependency hell is always self-inflicted)

What a dumb, dumb idea. We already avoid debian/ubuntu because of the validation lack in the packaging, but this is just comically bad.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Pro tip- just use Debian or LMDE.