I hate having several package managers coexisting on my computer, and the only advantage of snap is that it solves a problem I’ve never encountered in 25 years.
snaps are a proprietary vendor-locked format, the only redeeming quality is being able to run them in cli (once Flatpak get that too, there is no valid reason for snaps to exist).
I just find it midly infuriating (if that even is a thing, meaning I hate it but it’s not that significant for me to distro hop on my work laptop) to have two “universal” package formats on my system with Canonical shoving the objectively worse one (from a free/libre pov) down my throat…
no you didn’t, you can install flatpak using the terminal but iirc flatpak are mostly made with GUI applications in mind, while snaps support installing command line utils quite well
It’s not successful though. Like, maybe if your measure of success is that it’s usable, sure. But no other OSes have adopted it. Not even Ubuntu’s downstream OSes like Mint or Pop_OS!.
Users don’t like it, vendors don’t like it, other OS maintainers don’t like it. I’m not sure why that would be considered successful.
I work with a woman who is just… something else. She went on and on about the new Napoleon cake the bakery was selling. She eventually brought us some. It was neapolitan.
When Mozilla provide the firefox deb package - Why not give it then? IMO snaps/flatpacks are slower to start, can’t be updated while running, takes more diskspace, and takes longer time to update. With the isolation we also have different kind of problems - have you given it the correct permission?, and how do you get keepassxc browser extension to work with it(they dont support it)?
Multiple standards are good, initially. Multiple visions and approaches can get tested. The best hopefully displaced the rest, whilst picking up all the other good ideas.
If there was only one standard we would get stuck with snaps with no alternatives.
Nix, guix, flatpak, and OSI images are all better “universal” packages managers on sheer technical merits while also not be a vendor locked proprietary solution.
Why? I’ve heard this for years at this point, but as someone who rarely uses snaps because they’re the only convenient option for software I’m using, I’m generally ambivalent about them.
People seem to hold really strong opinions about snap but I’ve never been able to get a straight answer, just a bunch of hand waving.
So that’s admittedly not a good look for canonical, but my read of that is that if you’re getting widely-known software from a developer who’s publishing it to snap themselves, and you’re cautious about your usage, snap is fine.
For example, essentially my only use of snap is to install certbot. If I follow the directions from certbot.eff.org precisely, then I’ll get certbot installed and no issues.
I certainly agree that (a) the system is ripe for abuse and (b) should be self-hostable to support Free software. Both of these could be fixed by canonical opening it up.
My biggest hit was when they pushed browsers to snaps, and I couldn’t do some of my school projects because my school stuff was on a separate disk that the snap was not allowed to access. (Had to use o365, and wasn’t installing windows to write my papers)
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