IgnacioUbuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote DEBs (Apparently)
nottheengineerClassic canonical move: Take community software, force snaps into it and then ship it.
Yep, I can not understand why Canonical keep pushing snaps on desktop
zosudo they get funding from hardware vendors? snaps use a lot more resources
Because they something to lock you in to Ubuntu. They want Ubuntu to be the only thing that uses snaps. They want to get snaps to be an Ubuntu exclusive feature, and once they can start convincing some random closed source devs to ship in only the snap format they have a hook to keep you on Ubuntu. And they want those random random closed source devs to be focused on more of the corporate world so they can sell some support licenses.
Snap is easily available on other distros as well. If anything, they want to lock you into their proprietary store.
because they won’t need to maintain it, they won’t even need to maintain the depencencies some guy online will maintain the package and it’s dependency for them, whether it’s updated or not, it’s going to launch, that’s the whole point of those style of packaging
Avid AmoebaBecause maintaining snaps is a lot less work for whoever maintains the package, upstream developers, volunteers, or Canonical.
rodneyck‘Classic canonical corporate move’…there I fixed it for you.
stravanasuTime to change distro.
Honestly for new/average users, those who tend to use Ubuntu, I always would recommend Manjaro. Since I use arch btw myself I have a bias but using pacman, being rolling release, and having access to the AUR (+ Flatpaks) set Manjaro apart from other distros for average users.
But frankly I never understood why Debian itself is considered an “intermediate” distro since it’s no harder than Ubuntu to use IMO.
EddyBotI’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
It’s just because I’m a newbie – having been using Linux for one year, and started with Ubuntu simply because that was shipped ready with my laptop. I haven’t found the time to try any other distro yet, because of work & lack of time.
Indeed I remember I was thinking about moving to Linux years ago, exactly when the Amazon-Ubuntu craziness happened, so I thought “some other time”.
3lawsThanks for the tip!
If it works, don’t switch distros. There’s always a distro which does sth. better.
That’s also true! Sometimes out of curiosity I might explore with "live cd"s rather than really reinstalling a distro.
Trying sth new is never a bad idea. From live cd’s, over vm’s or distrobox containers, it makes you more comfortable in switching between environments.
the first thing I did with Ubuntu is uninstall all snaps and stores. it was an option, soon it wont be.
CassiniWardenI’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?
Snap is very similar just not portable to most other distros. It makes a lot of sense both for users and for vendor lock-in.
Snap is portable to other distros, look at the official website and you see a list of distros, you can use snap on. That doesn’t mean that there is no vendor lock-in, just a different kind. Snap as a format grew out of Cannonicals effort in the mobile field. Snaps where supposed to be the truly convergent successor to click, the packaging format used by Ubuntu Touch. And this history is baked into its DNA. It’s right there on the snapcraft website: “The app store for Linux”. As such Cannonical has always courted proprietary software and/or software by big companies (VS Code was first released as a snap for a reason). I think that they have always have had an eye on one day adding app payments and the sweet, sweet 30% cut they can take from every sale
The sandbox requires apparmor, so doesn’t work on anything else by default except OpenSUSE I think.
Solus and Manjaro are shipping Snap installed by default and I’ve never had a problem installing snapd on fedora. All I ever had to do for that was run a single standard dnf install. Apparmor doesn’t pose the problem you think it does
Running software unsandboxed is breaking most of the value of snap. Not only is it insecure many of the portability promises are actually broken and it can load incorrect libraries, etc.
Fedora deleted snap from its repos years ago. It is a totally broken mess.
A big issue for me with snap is, that the server side software is proprietary. So it really really does feel like they are trying for lock-in
The server side is fairly trivial and has already been prototyped separately.
If it is trivial, why is Canonical keeping it proprietary?
Because it’s extra work to make it open source as well as few outside of Canonical are interested in contributing. In that case that work is better spent on other, higher priority items. My guess is that they’ve gauged that the cloud end being open source won’t move the needle on who uses Snap and Ubuntu so they’ve deemed it low priority. Personally I’m using Ubuntu and therefore Canonical has root on my system. Given I can implement a cloud end for Snap, it bares very little importance that today the cloud end isn’t open source since it’s run by the folks that have root on my system and supply all other packages on my system. In fact we don’t know what the cloud end for the apt repos is. :)
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.
In my experience, performance of snap apps is just abhorrent. The consume a huge amount of disk space which translates to extremely long load times for the apps.
Principles aside, this just makes them unusable for me. I use flatpak when there’s no other option, but strive to use deb either natively or through PPA.
LvxferreYeah, nah, that’s a dealbreaker for me. I’m back to LMDE when this happens.
I don’t mind having snaps available but I’d avoid using them whenever possible. They’re larger than necessary, slower than necessary, and I trust software checked by its original devs plus distro maintainers more than software checked by the devs alone.
m3adowMaybe I need to reconsider Pop OS. Last time I tried they shipped with a broken kernel, but that’s probably fixed now.
entropicdriftIf stability is a concern, Mint has been great for me
I’ve been using Mint with Cinnamon for quite some time on my home PC. I wanted to try something different on my notebook.
Fair enough
Reverse ModuleUbuntu and Snaps are the cancer of the Linux world. :)
thatsnothowyoudoitSnaps I get, but Ubuntu? Aside from an asinine application process to get hired a Canonical, they did a lot to push for a more straightforward Linux desktop experience. Their time has passed, but cancer is a bit much.
Context: I came to Ubuntu from Gentoo. Debian before that and a brief flirt with the hot fantastic mess that was Mandrake when I first discovered Linux.
Snaps is just the latest controversial tech they haved pushed for. They have a long history of pushing for things they have created that people don’t want or don’t want their implementation of (like upstart or the original unity desktop env). Or pushing for stuff before it is ready (like pulseaudio).
Nothing wrong with pushing for your own tech, but they do seem to miss the mark a lot on what they want to introduce. And keep upsetting the community over it.
There is a problem with pushing tech if that tech is proprietary — such as with Snaps.
Unity I don’t think was ever that controversial, except that Ubuntu was sending all desktop search queries to Amazon at one point, which was, of course, terrible privacy-wise. The reason why Unity died is because Ubuntu decided it’s not worth the money to maintain it.
There was a little t of community backlash when they first released unity as its own thing. Lots of people hated it because it was very different from what came before. That is what made it controversial.
That’s why I left for MX Linux.
I never found out what’s wrong with APT.
Aren’t you sorta trusting whoever wrote any package you install with root? I mean, you should have that attitude anyhow as packages have a huge attack surface so privilege escalation bugs are way more common than remote execution but still, flatpak and snap at least offer a bit of a sandbox which might improve…
The track record has been very good as far as i know with thousands of packages over the years so I doubt if there is a real problem to be solved here.
Managing dependency hell. This is a common problem for all package managers that don’t typically bundle dependencies. You can get 30000 open source packages from trusted sources to all share the same dependencies for an OS release. That’s what Debian does. However it’s a lot of work and that works increases significantly when you try to do it for a piece of software across OS releases.
Read - it’s difficult for LibreOffice or Mozilla to ship a new version of their software that works on several Debian or Ubuntu releases. It’s also difficult for maintainers to do that.
You could of course include dependencies in debs, but then you’re increasing the security attack surface of the OS, because there’s no sandbox around those bundled dependencies. Bundling dependencies requires sandboxing to be safe. Otherwise whenever there’s a security hole in one library in package X, package X might patch it, but the same library might exist in another 50 packages on the system unpatched.
This is a solved problem. It was done in Android, iOS, BlackBerry 10 and probably others. All OSes that had to deal with more than 30000 packages, open source or proprietary, from trusted or untrusted sources. Bundle non-system dependencies and confine in a sandbox. Snap’s been doing this ever since it was called Click. Flatpak did the didn’t have the sandbox part for a while if I’m not mistaken. I’m not sure what its current sandbox state is.
RecantWhy 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.
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.
Because they controll snaps. Their backend is proprietary and they do not support any other way of distribution.
Now there are some objective benefits to Snaps compared to Flatpaks, at least so I was told. Apparently they offer significantly better documentation and integrate more tightly with the system, allowing you to do more stuff with them.
This was a while back tho, I don’t know where Flatpak stands today
Canonical also sells private Snaps repos for a shy amount of 30 000$ per year
nitrokey.com/…/nextbox-why-we-decided-and-against…
nitrokey.com/…/nextbox-why-we-decided-and-against…
Yes, it’s good that they make money with such services. Services like hosting are a great way.
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.
Giving up on Unity was a shame
Sooo they have ADHD and suffer with hyperfixation with the rest of us ADHDers?
optissimaExcept that this is a corporation so it doesn’t have ADHD.
So a corporation is just run by robots and not humans? Makes perfect sense.
A corporation is operated through a series of set rules, which dictate how it runs. It is structured in a way that is tangible, whereas the structure of the human mind is currently only theorized. I am reluctant to use terms like ADHD to describe corporations because that is prescribing a list of abstracted properties to them which we can definitely see that it doesn’t have internally. Unless the there is a set of unchanging principles that is the list of ADHD symptoms, no, not ADHD.
The worst page from the Google and Microsoft playbook
that convergent phone thing
Tbf I think convergence could be the killer feature which pushes mobile Linux into large-scale adoption. Also Purism has its Librem 5 phone as convergent, too. It’s not just Canonical.
They’re the Google of Linux.
How so?