I’ve never used a distro that offered/forced snaps so I’m not very familiar with this perpetual topic. Given it’s Linux and you have options why would you continue using a distribution who had a main feature you didn’t like?
Edit: Debian is server king. Proxmox, trueNAS, Clonezilla, Ubuntu you can go on and on of very niche tailored and rather amazing products that base on Debian. I’m ever curious if there are people out there using Gentoo, Arch or xyz in the server space.
@fernandu00@terminhell I mean a simple grep to filter them out could have sufficed and then that could be aliased but yeah makes sense. Also zsys and their half assed ZFS integration made no sense.
You’re right… But I don’t have an ssd in my machine and didn’t want tons of mounted filesystems in my 10 year old machine…I’m far from an expert but seems to me that is simpler to have all my packages from dnf or apt …I’ve changed to fedora because dnf seemed better than apt resolving dependencies …not just because of the snap thing
Fedora is actually my main on my other machines. This is my server though. I’ve tried fedora server in the past, but it wasnt quite working for what I needed it for at the time. And now, I don’t have time to rebuild =\
In my case I hate that I’ll be watching a movie or tv show using Kodi on my HTPC and I’ll get a bunch of “drive removed” “drive added” notification popups and sounds when snap auto updates. I’ve looked around to see what might be updating and I swear it’s always something stupid like gnome-calculator. Like who TF cares…
They also kill performance if you’re still using a hard drive as your system drive. I know we should all be using SSDs, it’s 2023, but sometimes it’s not always possible
Does it? I was a Ubuntu user for many years, until I made the switch to Debian 12 sometime ago. And Snaps never really slowed down things for me, despite using a 5400rpm HDD. Ubuntu on 5400rpm HDD, with its Snaps, is snappier than Windows 10 on SSD.
I think Snap has the potential to be better than Flatpak. It’s a real sandbox instead of the half-assed shit Flatpak has going on. The problem I have with Snap is that Canonical keeps the Server closed-source. I don’t want a centralized app store where Canonical can just choose to remove apps they don’t like. So as long as the Server is closed-source, I will stay on Flatpak
I asked the question because of the label “half-assed” that the commenter above me put on Flatpak. I do not know much about snap, Flatpak and how they differ (other than the fact that both are used as containerisation technologies for desktop apps and the former is by Canonical), and why Flatpak is necessarily worse that snap (by what metric? System performance? Storage?)
@MigratingtoLemmy@I_like_cats I wondered about that, but to me it just feels like an isolated file system based app structure, kinda like the .app folders in Macs. Does that sound right?
And with permissions, you can stop the app from accessing anything outside of its specific little file system.
I don’t know if sideloading snap apps is a thing, but it has been proven that creating a snap repo isn’t particularly difficult. Snap server being closed isn’t really an issue Imho.
Isn’t the issue that snap doesn’t even support third party repos to begin with? So you’d have to patch the client before you can even access any other servers. Unless they have fixed that in the meantime.
There are many reasons one could choose to hate Snap packages, and this not one of them. It’s like hating a webbrowser because it spawns 20 processes that (the horror) you would all see when you run ps. It’s just a part of how container technologies work.
I haven’t used Ubuntu since the pre-snap era, but from discussions online I think that every program is stored in a different squashfs that is mounted at boot.
And to make it worse, snap keeps copies of previous versions of all programs. Which can be good if you need to roll something back, but at least last time I used Ubuntu it didn’t provide any easy way to configure retention or clean up old snaps.
Don’t know about Snap, but Flatpak download sizes decrease significantly after installing the main platform libraries, they can become really small; of course that’s pretty much fully negated if you’re installing Electron apps, but even then 500MB isn’t very accurate, more like 150MB on average
flatpak run com.very.easy.to.remember.and.type.name
Yes I hate it, what is even more annoying is that you can do flatpak install someapp and it will search matches on its own, it shows them to you to let you decide, but after that you can’t do flatpak run someapp because it “doesn’t exist”
Yes, sizes might be inaccurate - it’s been about a year last time I tried snap or flatpak. All I remember is that snap installs around 300 mb gtk3 runtime and it’s often 2 or more of them, because different snaps might rely on different gtk versions + other dependencies.
And I remember that when snap and flatpak compared, allegedly flatpak requires more storage space.
I am aware that runtime sizes doesn’t scale with number of packages past maybe 3-4, but I have only 4 appimages on my system right now and they take ~200 mb, it is absurd that I’d need 10 times more space allocated for the same (or worse) functionality.
Then you do a flatpak list and it abbreviates the shit out of the identifiers so you can’t use them either. Whoever designed that UX needs to lean back an contemplate life a bit.
Sure, it’s possible. I can also use flatpak list -d to show everything. But the combination of these defaults is just fucked up UX (require the full id for certain operations, but don’t always show the full id by default).
Yeah honestly they could have avoided putting Branch, Origin and Installation if there isn’t enough space available.
The CLI definitely needs some polishing, not to mention flatpak update breaking horrendously on scrollback
Snaps have a similar deduplication mechanism, and snaps allows calling apps from their names like you would do with regular packages.
I think the reason for the second one is that while snaps are also meant to be used in servers/cli flatpak is built only with desktop GUI apps in mind.
Runtimes are okay, the problem is there is no runtime package manager and often you have like 7 of them, which is horrible. But on modern hard drives also no problem.
Appimages cant be easily ran from terminal, you need to link then to your Path.
Which will be duplicated for everything installed application, and redownloaded for every new version. Whereas flatpak and snappy shares the dependencies between applications.
s/f - flatpak run com.very.easy.to.remember.and.type.name
Snappy makes easily run command line shortcuts. Flatpak could use some improvements there though.
Add comment