A new ‘app store’ is expected to ship as part of Ubuntu 23.10 when it’s released in October — and it’ll debut with a notable change to DEB support.
Tldr: the new store only supports snaps, deb support will come later. OP, please provide summary next time if you link to clickbait articles.
Deb support will come later, but:
If the same piece of software exists in the Ubuntu repository and the snap store the new store will only make it possible to install the snap version.
So the title is on point IMO.
Ok, note taken 👍
Or this time as both title and summary can be edited.
Why is Ubuntu pushing snaps so hard? Is there objectively a benefit to them apart from Flatpak?
It seems like an odd hill to die on.
Canonical is just weird like that, it seems. They tend to pick something and fixate on it really hard (Eg. Unity desktop, Mir, that convergent phone thing, now Snaps) and work on it until it’s almost really good, then they get fixated on the next shiny thing and dump whatever they were doing to go chase that instead.
They’re the Google of Linux.
There’s a benefit to Canonical, the corp that maintains Ubuntu, which is that while snaps are open source tech, the server for the snap store is closed source and snap can’t be configured to point at another store.
In other words, it’s about centralized control.
There are some advantages to the tech itself, like live auto-updating, which is good for security-critical server apps, but over all I’m not a fan.
I don’t think that the board members are sitting there and pondering how they can exercise more control on the user via snaps.
The auto updating is a nice benefit but it doesn’t seem like a big enough benefit to allocate so many developer man hours into. I would think that Canonical would realize that the developers time is better spent making features the users want.
But what do I know? I’m just someone posting on Lemmy not a Canonical board member haha
It could be like the old RPM vs DEB arguments. Technically, one could have argued at the time that RPM was explicitly singled out in the Linux Standard base.
However, these days, DEB certainly feels more common (although, from my understanding, Redhat/Slack is big in enterprise, so i’m not actually sure which is more common).
Except both RPM and DEB are fully open-source. Flatpak is open-source, Snap is partly proprietary.
Why do Linux nerds that care about this sort of stuff hate snaps so much?
Is it the concept of snaps / flatpaks that is the issue or snaps specifically because Canonical is behind them?
I know literally nothing about how they work except I installed the VLC snap and it’s fine.
I couldn’t install Parsec (a remote desktop game streaming app) because of a missing dependency (an old version of lib-something codec that wasn’t in my newer version of Ubuntu). I spent like an hour trying to figure out how to take the 18.04 version and add it to 22.10. I don’t know Linux at all so I wasn’t making much progress. Someone, not the developers of Parsec, made a flatpak and it magically worked.
I was afraid that because the flatpak was made by some random guy I couldn’t really trust it. I looked inside the flatpak and it’s seems to be nothing except for the Parsec deb coming straight from the official Parsec URL and that libcodec thing that was causing a problem.
So from my perspective, not knowing the technical details or politics, what’s the problem?
The snap store is proprietary, flatpaks handle the graphical app space better, OCI containers handle the service space better, and really high reported load times.
Flatpaks are awesome IMHO.
Honestly not sure why it matters, provided the store is full. Both are similar to end users
Looks like Ubuntu will be going the way of Reddit
deleted by creator
Time to change distro.
I’m kinda baffled people would jump ship because of this matter
Snaps have been a thing for 7 years and before that Canonical did similar really weird things (Amazon shopping lense a decade ago anyone?)anyone who really cares already uses something else
The Fedora software app has been promoting flatpaks over native packages, even not displaying that native packages are available even if they are, requiring the command line tool to access some native packages. So I don’t see how this is fundamentally different.
The fundamental difference is that flatpak is a good system, adopted by many distributions.
Snap sucks and only Ubuntu uses it.
They’ll do like their Unity UI, wait many years until they realize their mistake then drop it.
I hate that they also SEO’d the hell out of major search engines to show snap setup and installation instructions when anyone searches for installing a package. E.g. “arch install firefox” leads to https://snapcraft.io/install/firefox/arch which is downright dishonest marketing.
On google it’s the 4th result for me even in private mode which seems pretty reasonable. The first result is the firefox archwiki page.
I beg to differ. I think it’s very harmful.
- There as absolutely no reason for anyone in Arch to use snap to install something mainstream like Firefox. Same goes for other OS’s like Fedora etc. (which are all mined in similar way, just change it to /fedora for instance).
- The page presents itself as if it’s the only choice, and can easily scam someone who’s just getting into Linux into installing snap. I think it’s designed for that purpose. Arch links to the package, but not step by step guide (which is on Arch), but this can easily lure people into installing snap and being none the wiser the it’s not the default package manager for their distro.
- It’s 4th for Firefox, but I’ve seen it as the top result for some other packages. Probably Google caught up, or probably for packages not mainstream as Firefox it still shows snap as number one result.
I’ve been using more and more flatpaks lately on arch and fedora based distros, i have no idea how snaps compare but seems similar? Seems an odd push from Ubuntu, but could make more sense than deb packages for non techy users perhaps?
Ubuntu / Canonical were working on Snap for some years when Flatpak came on the scene. They’ve been shipping Ubuntu bits using it since 2016. In addition to the legacy, Snap is more versatile than Flatpak in that it can be used to package pretty much anything, including system bits. It’s also had a secure sandbox from the start. Changing to Flatpak would be a functionality downgrade for Canonical and Ununtu maintainers using Snap. In addition Flatpak can be used along with Snap on Ubuntu so there’s no need to not use both for whoever finds that useful. Snap lets Ubuntu ship software using less work, which means more up-to-date bits in Ubuntu. Users can install other software via Snap or Flatpak, whichever they find more useful.
