Okay, but…

Recently, my girlfriend (who I successfully migrated to Kubuntu) was complaining about ads on youtube, so I wanted to install Brave for her, since that works well as a chromium-based browser but still doesn’t show ads. (I’ve had issues trying to play youtube on Firefox with adblocker, probably because Google’s trying to discourage anything other than Chrome.)

Brave was available in the app store, and installed as a Snap. And it was fine. It installed fine, it works fine, no issues. Maybe it’s not the most efficient way to do things, and there certainly are issues with the snap system. But … it’s not the devil, and it’s not the end of the world.

As far as I know, technically speaking, Snap, the application side, is fully foss, but not the server side, meaning you can only install Snap packs integrated into the system from Canonical directly. And this is a big pain point for most.

Snap has a far better permission system and avoids many of the security pitfalls of Flatpak, but it being hardcoded to use Canonical’s proprietary server is BS. Also forcing people to use Snap is BS.