I think most snap haters mostly hate, that Canonical forces snap upon them, an wouldn't hate so much about it if they had the choice.
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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I also hate that it creates a loopback device for every installed snap
There's a lot I dislike about snap. This is the thing I hate.
Yeah, who'd hate using a package manager that increasingly slows down your boot time with every package installed, or that uses a closed source store to provide you FOSS
Maybe there's a reason canonical has to force it on their users
Isn't that kinda the same with, for example, Fedora and Flatpaks? Or Debian and debs? Or Ubuntu and debs? Or Fedora and rpms?
The packaging system that your distro provides gets you the packages you get. For a small number of packages that were a maintenance nightmare, Ubuntu provides a transitional debs to move people over to the snaps (e.g. Firefox, Thunderbird), but if you want to get it from another repo, you can do exactly what KDE Neon does by setting your preferences.
Fedora with Flatpaks is open and up front about whether you're getting a Flatpak or a system installed package, and lets you choose if both are available. And installing through dnf/yum isn't going to do anything at all with Flatpak.
And what about Debian with debs? That's literally what apt was designed to work with. If it gave you Flatpaks, or the flatpak command installed debs, that would be more like what Ubuntu is doing.
The fact that Canonical shoehorned snaps into apt is the problem. I've heard bad things about snap, but I wouldn't know because I've never used it, and I never will because of this.
When I tell my computer to do one thing and it does something completely different without my consent, that is a problem, and is why I left Windows. I don't need that in Linux too, and Canonical has proven they can't be trusted not to do that.
No, Debian doesn't take your apt install ... command and install a snap behind your back...
the thing people dislike about that is that you're silently moved from an open system to a closed-source one.
Debian's .deb hosting is completely open and you can host your own repository from which anyone can pull packages just by adding it to the apt config. fedora, suse, arch, same thing.
only Canonical can host snaps, and they're not telling people how the hosting works. KDE seems to upload their packages to the snap store for Neon, judging from their page.
also, crucially, canonical are not the ones doing the maintenance for those apt packages. the debian team does that.
the thing people dislike about that is that you're silently moved from an open system to a closed-source one.
Yeah. I didn't realize I had fallen for it until I tried to automate a system rebuild, and discovered that a bunch of the snap back end seems to be closed and proprietary.
And a lot of it for no reason. Reasonable apt and flatpak alternates existed, but Canonical steered me to their closed repackaged versions.
While Canonical's particular snap store implementation is closed source, all of the client software as well as the store API are open, and snap isn't even tied to using snaps from their store. One could easily make a client app that treats snapd much the way apt treats dpkg. (In fact given apt-rpm I think it would probably be feasible to quite literally use apt for that.)
KDE seems to upload their packages to the snap store for Neon, judging from their page.
KDE also maintains most of the flathub.org packages for KDE apps. Not sure what the point is here.
canonical are not the ones doing the maintenance for those apt packages. the debian team does that.
This is wrong in two ways. First, Canonical are the primary employers of a lot of Debian developers, including to do Debian maintenance or development. This includes at least one of the primary developers of apt. Canonical also upstreams a lot of their work to Debian. Second, of the three (!) whole packages that Canonical decided to make transitional packages to the snap, none were coming from upstream Debian. Firefox was being packaged by Mozilla (and Mozilla were the ones who decided to move it to the snap), Thunderbird's package had been something Canonical was packaging themselves due to the Debian/Mozilla trademark dispute that they never moved back to syncing from Debian due to technical issues with the port, and Chromium was, at least at the time, remaining frozen at old versions in a way that was unacceptable to Ubuntu users.
Good info. thanks.
One could easily make a client app
sure, and convince people to switch. it's been done before of course but it's a big effort. And anyway, the main point with the closed-server issue is that it's impossible to know what the server does other than serving packages. this is true for other package repositories to a certain extent since there's no real guarantee that they run the source code they show, but there's a distributed trust network there. as for the snap store, they could be doing anything in there.
KDE also maintains most of the flathub.org packages for KDE apps.
what i was trying to get at is that they're not hosting their own thing. they do host their own flatpak repo but it seems to be only for nightlies so that point wasn't as strong as i originally thought.
Canonical are the primary employers of a lot of Debian developers, including to do Debian maintenance or development. This includes at least one of the primary developers of apt.
that does not mean that the particular developer agrees with or even approves of the snap thing. it's good to know though. i know they upstream, but that's sort of the bare minimum expected of them.
i've not really used ubuntu desktop lately, but i've been hearing more complaints from friends about it deciding to install snaps instead of debs lately. steam was a big one that a friend had trouble with, and they just installed that though apt i'm pretty sure.
sure, and convince people to switch. it’s been done before of course but it’s a big effort
I agree! But this, IMO, is a better argument for how flathub.org being (theoretically) open source doesn't actually make it any better than snapcraft.io. The technical hurdle, either of writing another snap store or of setting up a flatpak host, pales in comparison to the social hurdle of getting people to switch. Which is likely why the previous open snap store implementation died. Nobody wanted to host their own and convince people to switch, because at the end of the day there wasn't any benefit.
that does not mean that the particular developer agrees with or even approves of the snap thing.
Never said it did, although in the particular case of the developer I mentioned, he's also an Ubuntu Core developer, which depends entirely on snaps. I can't imagine he'd have put himself in that position if he were particularly anti-snap
steam was a big one that a friend had trouble with, and they just installed that though apt i’m pretty sure.
Ubuntu has never had a steam package in their apt repos, and the steam-installer package still behaves the same way as ever. Personally, I do use the Steam snap and haven't had any issues with it, though I do know that others have.
I never used snap, always use official repo > multilib > extra > chaotic aur > aur > flatpak > FUCK IT, I BUILD FROM SOURCE CODE FROM SHADY GITHUB REPO
FUCK IT, I BUILD FROM SOURCE CODE FROM SHADY GITHUB REPO_*
I feel seen.
curl shit | sudo bash is just so convenient.
I hope you mean https://shit.
http://mysite.net | sudo bash
Yes, always from https://gìthub.com
Of course, you will certainly not regret piping curl into bash from GitHub.com.
I have NODE installed using snap lmao. Why? Installing it the normal way just gives me tons of errors that I'm too bored to deal with. I'm sure there's a fix, but I'm too lazy to debug all that. Of course, I don't use snap node for hosting servers and stuff. I just use it for react native. Regardless, it works n I'm happy lol
Yeah. I don't mind snap at all for cases where a better package doesn't exist.
What made me give up Ubuntu was how it railroaded me into snap versions of packages that work better, for me, as native .deb installs.
Oh definitely. Canonical forcing us to use snap Firefox was very shitty. I mean I still use Ubuntu because I'm lazy, but I did change the snap Firefox thing to the apt libraries or whatever.
I really don't understand why they don't just adopt flatpak.
I don't believe Flatpak has the ability to package something like node. It certainly can't package kernels or system services (at least not without leaving the user with a ton of manual work to do that would make it not much better than getting a tarball).
It's a shame that snaps are forced to use Canonicals closed source backend because they are really good, and a fully snap system is a very compelling idea for immutable systems
They're not forced to do so. You can install snaps locally (or provide a distribution system that treats snapd much the way apt treats dpkg), or you can point snapd at a different store. The snap store API is open and documented, and for a while there was even a separate snap store project. It seems to have died out because despite people's contention about Canonical's snap store, they didn't actually actually want to run their own snap stores.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. It makes perfect sense that Cannonical made it's own proprietary package ecosystem and while technically anyone can build their own snap store, ain't nobody got time for that.
Can you explain why it makes perfect sense?
Because people who just want their daily Two Minutes' Hate rather than actually having nuanced takes.