The title is a quote from Mastodon. I’ve always seen dislike towards snap so I was taken back when I saw this stance. The person who wrote this was referring to Tuxedo Laptops.
What are your thoughts on this?
EDIT:
Here’s the original comment: https://mastodon.social/@popey/112591863166141029
EDIT 2:
Some clarification for those accusing me of not following the thread or being disingenuous.
Didn’t bother to follow the thread?
I posted my question here before this particular response from the OP. I asked the question on Lemmy out of interest and wanting to get a wider perspective. I also engaged with the OP on the thread so that I can get their perspective on their stance.
Listen, I don’t even like Flatpaks, but at least they’re multi-platform and non-proprietary.
But the original poster is probably of the opinion that “pro-consumer” means something that “just works”, and if it’s a walled garden, so what?
“Why is there barbed wire at the top of that wall?” “Don’t worry about it.”
That would be a somewhat valid argument if Snaps “just worked” any better than Flatpaks. That has not been my experience.
Given the choice between an open standard and a proprietary one, the proprietary one damn well better have meaningful technological advantages. I don’t see that with Snaps. All I see is a company pouring effort into a system whose only value is that they are pouring effort into it. They should put that effort into something better.
Granted, it’s been a few years since I used Ubuntu and Snaps. Perhaps things have improved. It was nothing but headaches for me. A curse upon whoever decided to package apps that obviously require full file system access as Snaps. “User-friendly”, indeed.
From an enterprise/server perspective, when what you’re really paying for is first-party support, I guess Snaps make more sense. But again, that effort could be put toward something more useful.
I keep expecting them to die like Unity DE
Genuinely curious: what don’t you like about flatpaks?
I find that flatpaks are quite awesome, because you can have any distro, while all apps continue to work (but I’m also not a dev or anything, so don’t know about that side of the story).
Duplication of resources mainly. Bloat upon bloat. Worse, a Flatpak can ignore things that it probably should use on the system, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
Don’t get me wrong, there are supposed “bare metal” installs that duplicate all sorts of things too, and I don’t like it when that happens either. Steam, for example, keeps at least one extra copy of itself as well as a bunch of other things.
And there’s that Flatpaks an entirely different ecosystem that require their own set of updates.
I get it. I understand there are benefits. Doesn’t mean I like it.
Not to mention they are optional and not a replacement for something that worked fine.
Type this:
apt install firefox
Into your terminal on Ubuntu and you’ll see what is anti-customer.
I switched to Debian, partly because of snaps, what exactly is going on here with Ubuntu?
You can install Firefox only as a snap on Ubuntu. There’s no native package on the official repo.
I think a lot of the flak directed towards snap would be mitigated if they made the backend open source. I know there are some efforts to produce alternative backends (although the one I knew about
lol/lol-serverseems to have gone dark).Another issue is Canonical’s rather strong armed and forceful approach to making people use snaps rather than the OSs native packaging system, again, not something that should be an issue in theory but when people already have a negative view of the format to start with…
Personally I don’t really have an issue with Snaps. I’ve had more luck with them and fewer issues than Flatpaks (which I also tend to avoid like the plague) but that is probably just because I prefer to use appimages or native packages rather than having to fight the sandbox permissions and weird things it can do to apps that don’t take Snaps and Flatpaks properly into account.
Yeah I wouldn’t hate snaps if it wasn’t for canonical saying they wouldn’t force them on people, then making
aptinstall snaps instead of .debs without the user asking for it.The more snaps you have, the slower your machine will boot. It’s uniquely shit technology that should die already.
- LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 23•4 months ago
Not wanting to elect dictators is anti-democracy!
Basically the same logic
I don’t think he knows what “anti-consumer” means
There already is Flatpak. Many proprietary apps are shipped as Snaps, which helps with Flatpak packaging as the binaries can just be packed into a different container.
Snap developers kinda help with making the whole portals, isolated apps stuff work.
But thats about it.
The Venn diagram of supported apps isn’t also a perfect circle. You can’t run VPNs as Flatpaks, and Flathub disallows CLI apps from being submitted (because the UX of using a sandboxed CLI app sucks). Snap doesn’t have these issues.
because the UX of using a sandboxed CLI app sucks
I think it is more because of this issue because as far as I know snaps have some level of sandbox and you can still use CLI apps as you said.
Very interesting read, thanks for the link. This seems like a major shortcoming of flatpak!
This is another issue with:
https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/46
https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak.github.io/issues/191
https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/1651
Others like valve have just ignored the issue for years, but the flatpak devs decided to argue that it doesn’t apply to them, to the point that one even mentioned modifying the spec so that they are exempt…
Yeah that’s solidly it. I use strictly confined CLI snaps all the time. (In fact, I maintain the snaps for a couple of CLI apps.) They work fine as long as the snap has the right plugs.
But I don’t want to have to run
flatpak run dev.htop.htopto get to htop.
No there are many CLI apps on Flathub.
Helix, and others.
Helix opens it’s own GUI when you run it. It’s not a CLI app in the same sense as
git. I’m curious on the others you mention, since as a packager, I’ve seen firsthand CLI apps being declined (or allowed, but only with a hidden status on flathub.org)Interesting. Yes I had some other editor too, it opened a new terminal tab.
There is some flatpak export bin directory where the binaries are, I think you can put that to your PATH and have a pretty good CLI experience.
That’s one of the dumbest things I ever heard
I think that phrases like ‘anti-consumer’ can stick to any target, so long as they’re thrown with a sufficient amount of bullshit.
Can you link the original quote? I feel like there is a lot of context missing here.
Sure! I’ve added it to the post as well.
Didn’t bother to follow the thread?
https://mastodon.social/@popey/112593520847827981>
Sure. Other people can do that if they want.
I don’t have a problem with companies bundling whatever packages they want on their distro.
The difference comes when they actively block installation (just like Mint does). That is what is anti-consumer. It adds confusion to users as they have to go and find out what random file in /etc/ needs to be edited or removed, just to install some software. It’s stupid.
You may disagree, that’s fine. It’s okay to not like things.
Did you look at the timestamps? I posted my question here before this particular response from the OP. I asked the question on Lemmy out of interest and wanting to get a wider perspective.
I also engaged with the OP on the thread so that I can get their perspective on their stance.
Yeah they linked the reply I got for asking OP why he thought that and I just went there because of your thread. Seriously lol
Guy called me a nerd just for pointing out Tuxedo even explains on their website how to install snap.
It made a lot of sense after seeing he used to work at Canonical, lol.
I’m of the same opinion as you. I tried to understand why OP has said opinion (that’s why I posted here and engaged with them). Thank you for positively adding to the conversation.
The difference comes when they actively *block* installation (just like Mint does).
Dude’s anti-Mint as well. From a different comment, seems like he works (or worked) for Ubuntu.
You know what seems more anti-consumer to me? Trash-talking your competition for making different choices to you with your FOSS they’re legally allowed to re-distribute with any changes they like.
It’s almost like if people don’t prefer those changes or something then they won’t be popular? Oh wait, Mint is hugely popular…
My guess at the stance is I’d imagine it’s that switching away from snaps is switching away from Ubuntu’s support and security monitoring and updates to some less known/reliable/diligent third party?
Popey (Alan Pope) used to work for Canonical / Ubuntu, so he’s presumably not inclined to jump on the bandwagon of Canonical/Ubuntu/snap hate since he knows a lot of Canonical and Ubuntu people and their motivations and work. Not that there aren’t good reasons to criticize snap or other Canonical decisions, but it’s also plain that a lot of people just join a hate bandwagon and don’t even know what about it they object to. There is masses of wrong-headed criticism of Canonical out there e.g. I’ve frequently seen people criticize creating Upstart, saying Canonical should have used systemd, or bzr vs git! Presumably these people were annoyed at Canonical for not inventing a time machine.
Use apt. Its more secure.
Except you can’t