Mastodawn

It's a glib comparison but Snaps remind me a bit of that time Apple put a (free) U2 album on everyone's iPod/iPhone and assumed everyone would be grateful but people were REALLY annoyed by it.

@omgubuntu You're holding it wrong.

Liam @ GamingOnLinux 🐧🎮Jul 6, 2023

@omgubuntu technically, SteamOS is sort-of Flatpak defaulted since the main OS is locked :P

Matt

Jul 6, 2023

@gamingonlinux @omgubuntu Yes, but that came out long after people were used to Flatpaks.

Snaps were mandatory before people got a chance to like them.

Then add on that they weren't very good at the beginning.

Eat My Wings To Keep Me Tame Jul 6, 2023

@thelinuxcast @gamingonlinux @omgubuntu steam OS being locked down with flatpak as the default is understandable, its a mass market product not explicitly designed for power users. The less ways it can break the better for steamOS from valves perspective. They still let us do fun stuff anyway if you know what youre doing

__Miguel_Jul 6, 2023

@redlilrascal @thelinuxcast @gamingonlinux @omgubuntu Indeed. Not to mention "Desktop Mode" is not really meant for "public consumption", it's there for the tinkerers.

Most Steam Deck users will likely never drop to desktop, especially because you need a rather expensive dock to do it (seriously, USB-C to HDMI adapters with included USB hub are MUCH more expensive these days. Couple of years ago managed to snag one for under €30 - no Ethernet, but still...).

Pobega Jul 6, 2023

I think with SteamOS people are more willing to accept that a game console would have an immutable operating system by default.

five82 Jul 6, 2023

@gamingonlinux @omgubuntu I don’t think any Flatpaks are installed by default though and there are alternatives such as AppImage, Homebrew, and soon Nix.

skyeye Jul 6, 2023

@gamingonlinux
In the realm of gaming it helps to have flatpak since it's always the most updated version and correct libraries. Emulators and games just need to run good in their sandbox on whatever setup the desktop and kernel setup. I've been using chimeraos on a handheld PC and it's not always perfect but it's a smooth experience
@omgubuntu

B@1ty Jul 6, 2023

@omgubuntu that's exactly it! Open source is supposed to be about choice.

Leaflet Jul 6, 2023

@baiteh @omgubuntu No, it is supposed to be about freedom.

Ryan Kage Jul 6, 2023

@omgubuntu I think people were more pissed that they couldn’t remove the album at the time lol.

__Miguel_Jul 6, 2023

@omgubuntu No, no, it's a very appropriate comparison.

Only you can't really get rid of the album this time :P

Mateusz Olech Jul 6, 2023

@omgubuntu today I was running apt upgrade and as an software 'update' i got entire new snap install of firefox. Even as I had one installed from flatpak for entire time I have this ubuntu install...
If I wanted I should be able to have it compiled from source or something else entirely. But no, ubuntu people know better whats best for me.
This approach is strikingly similar to windows and it's 'we will not let you uninstall edge'

Leaflet Jul 6, 2023

@astromateusz @omgubuntu Also make sure to apt remove Firefox. Something probably happened with the transitional packaged that prompted the reinstall.

Mateusz Olech Jul 6, 2023

@that_leaflet yeah did usual purge, it's just so annoying

Pixdigit Jul 6, 2023

@omgubuntu also snap has only a single proprietary store. Flatpak has multiple and is open source.

Lyle, a walking haunted house Jul 6, 2023

@Pixdigit @omgubuntu and, from an enterprise perspective, everything I've read says snaps update when the store tells them to, not when the admin does.

Not giving me a way to schedule and control when my systems check in for updates, and when they get deployed, is a fantastic way to get a "no, thanks" from me

Pēteris Krišjānis Jul 6, 2023

@omgubuntu I think it also have some echoes of Canonical wanting snap to stick around badly, so it feels forced a bit? Community around flatpak - and it has tons of controversies for sure - have just grown more organically, and it responds to challenges better. I haven't invested time to understand snap, so I have no reflection point against it.

@peteriskrisjanis Organic is a great descriptor. There's been very little organic about Snaps, even the big-name software didn't get there organically (the stories are out there of Canonical cold-calling developers to pressure them into adopting Snaps, and in many cases, doing the work for them).

smeg Jul 6, 2023

@omgubuntu Right. Instead of saying, "Thing is great, you have no choice to adopt it for XYZ. Oh, it broke something? Too bad!" the Flatpak approach was, "we'll make this thing available, and let people offer their apps on it. Oh, people like it? Great!"

They let people make their own decisions, and had it prove its benefit.

@omgubuntu IMO it's less "It was forced on us" (Ubuntu 'forces' tons of changes, like default apps and stuff like pulseaudio over the years). It's more that a) it was pretty broken for a desktop experience, and b) it's Canonical - it's in ✋ vogue ✋ to hate on Canonical, and hard to trust, c) propriatary backend (although this is overblown), d) Was mostly Ubuntu only, e) (next toot)

@omgubuntu One big reason is that there was (from the user space) no *need* for snaps. Most users just assume that all that packaging to update software is done magically in the background by elves and pixies. They don't understand there's cost and effort to do it. Also, 3rd party devs were like "we have debs that work, go away".

@popey Right. I'm thinking about this purely from an end-user's POV too. Like, it's possible to make/impose changes and get people on board but you can't do that by regressing a core experience. Noble aims, though noble, don't calm people irritated that their browser is suddenly bugging out and they can't just 'use what they used before'.

@omgubuntu it’s a mistake canonical has made so many times. Introduce something before it’s ready / finished. Unity, pulse audio, shopping lens, snap …

Chris Anderson Jul 6, 2023

@omgubuntu I'd say the perceived slower performance of snaps vs flatpaks drives some of the resentment. Immediately noticeable on Firefox for example, the default Web browser of the distro pushing snaps.

@sproosemoose That's absolutely played into it. Flaws were more pronounced in the early days of Snaps, making a(n even poorer) first impression. You can't tell people "we've changed your browser to a Snap - it's better" and then give them a worse experience than what they had. They see through it. It's almost, without getting too emotive about software, borderline insulting.

Steffen Voß Jul 6, 2023

@omgubuntu People hate change they didn't choose.

@kaffeeringe That's basically the tl;dr of it, yeah!

robryk Jul 6, 2023

One can also ~easily do something similar to what flatpak would do by invoking bbwrap in a similar fashion. That allows people who want only some of facets of flatpak to get them, without resenting that they have to use the others.

(I don't know whether the same's the case with snap, though.)

js Jul 7, 2023

@robryk @omgubuntu You mean like https://github.com/Midar/bubblewine?

GitHub - Midar/bubblewine: Wrapper to sandbox wine

Wrapper to sandbox wine. Contribute to Midar/bubblewine development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

Chris P 🏳️‍🌈🍁Jul 6, 2023

@omgubuntu It's definitely that, but also snaps were pretty buggy at launch as well, launching snap Firefox took like a good 15 seconds longer than non snap

Now adays it's mostly *okay* but yeah first impressions of it have left a bad taste

Lukáš Zapletal Jul 6, 2023

snaps is twitter

flatpak is mastodon

AdeptVeritatis Jul 6, 2023

@lzap @omgubuntu

flatpak is MSN

James Henstridge Jul 6, 2023

@omgubuntu There were technical reasons behind the decision to move web browsers from debs to snaps, as it greatly reduced the maintenance burden.

As a worst case, imagine the period just after an LTS release has come out, and you need to put out a Firefox security update. There's two other supported LTS releases, and the previous Ubuntu release still has a few months of support left. Each of those releases builds for about 6 architectures. That's a lot of builds to push out.

It's also possible the new version of the browser doesn't compile with the compiler in the oldest Ubuntu releases, so it may need a compiler backport to build.

With the snaps, we just need one build per architecture that will run on all releases. Further more it can easily use the libraries and compiler from a newer release as its runtime, so less need for backports.

@jamesh As I said, technical reasons aside.

Jon Jennings Jul 6, 2023

@omgubuntu
Open source for me has always been about choice.
When I first moved from Windows Vista to Ubuntu 6.06 it freaked me out that there were now 5 different ways to do anything, different commands that overlapped.
Over time I grew to love not being told what to do or locked into any one tool.
Ubuntu's forcing of snaps on everybody went totally against that and is why I left for Debian.

"There are 2 things people hate: the way things are, and change." <--- 🤣

Empire Jul 6, 2023

@omgubuntu
(Well, SteamOS if that counts, basically requires flatpak for desktop apps.) I don't hate either snap nor flatpak, I just don't like either.

I agree with your statement though, I found myself wandering to Fedora but mostly for reasons of newer plasma and Wayland.

The snap Firefox update notifications/process feels pretty clumsy/dated/unnecessary though.

linuxham Jul 6, 2023

@omgubuntu I run Arch Linux, and Debian, they are community distros that don't force anything on me

Electw Jul 6, 2023

@omgubuntu From a normie perspective (mine), I preferred Flatpaks to Snaps because they launched faster and respected the GTK theme more often.

24😷-185 Jul 7, 2023

@omgubuntu My experience with snaps so far is the following:

* Stupid syntax: to update something it’s not "snap update", it’s "snap refresh". Why.
* Snap counterparts to .DEB packages have lesser quality. MuseScore? Stuck to version 2. Steam? You have to mess with the permissions in order to connect to your account, only to see that this version doesn’t handle well games stored on NTFS partitions.

AdeptVeritatis Jul 8, 2023

If you try to use Flatpak as a developer outside of GitHub and the usual programming languages and outside of a corporation, stemming the costs, you may realize, that it is the same walled garden like the rest.

And that is, why I rant about Flatpak, technical stuff aside.

But they don't directly spit into our faces, at least. That is reason enough for many people to trust them.

AdeptVeritatis Jul 8, 2023