Could someone ELI5 whats wrong with snaps? I see hate for them all over the place but as an end user with little technical knowledge of linux packaging they seem fine? I can install them and use them, they don’t appear to have any anti-FOSS gotchas, so whats the big deal?
I think it’s another fine example of Canonical pushing its own products rather than supporting and enhancing existing standards (flatpak and appimage), which people are getting tired of. Also, as I understand it, the snap store itself is proprietary and is therefore controlled by Canonical.
The server isn’t open source, so Canonical has the sole ability to control snap distribution. It’s also yet another example of Canonical’s “Not Invented Here” syndrome, where they constantly reinvent things so they can control it instead of working with the rest of the open source community. They also trick you into using snaps; for example if you explicitly tell it to use apt to install Firefox, it’ll install it as a snap anyways.
Historically they performed really poorly as well, but my understanding is that they’ve largely fixed that issue.
Too late, I’m on Manjaro for the TV computer now. Super annoying when all I use it for is a browser for Jellyfin when the update popup shows up all the time and doesn’t even update when you follow its instructions.
I know and did the workaround a couple times, but updates through apt is one of the major strengths of Linux for me. Or pacman now, whatever Manjaro has.
I should give it a shot. I went with the best sounding option when googling for distros that handle scaling the best. That way I can keep resolution high for movies, but have text at 200% without certain system menus being tiny the way they were on Ubuntu with Gnome.
if i wanted containerized environments, i would pick alpine, but it all makes most trivial things so much more complicated — i just want global install dang nabbit, just keep all your sandboxing on process level controlled by the kernel, give me my userspace freedom
Snaps at least integrate into the command line will. Flatpak running dolphin it’s flatpak run org.kde.Dolphin or something compared to snap which is just “dolphin” Doesn’t change the fact that you can’t get snaps to use Breeze which is unacceptable.
@azurefirefly@spez If I recall correctly you can autocomplete the package name. I understand what you mean, having this long names can be underproductive when you know only one app exists with that name, but imagine having various apps with the same name. This naming allows for easier identification
You don’t have to. You can just write a bash script once that creates the alias automatically for every flatpak you install.
Or use one that someone else wrote.
I recently tried Ubuntu after many years, needed Docker and it told me to install it as a Snap, I thought, OK, whatever. I’m anything but a newbie, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out where the volumes were actually kept. That was the primary reason to abandon this experiment.
To containerize desktop apps I prefer Apptainer/Singularity, that’s pretty portable, usersapce, and requires less tinkering to integrate with the system than Docker. I use it for Zoom and other closed source crap. AppImage is probably the more standard solution for that that’s very similar technologically, but I’m already familiar with Apptainer from work.
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