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?

https://mastodon.social/@popey/112593520847827981

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.

  •  palordrolap   ( @palordrolap@kbin.run ) 
    64•5 months ago

    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.”

    •  GenderNeutralBro   ( @GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ) English
      25•5 months ago

      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.

    •  SeekPie   ( @SeekPie@lemm.ee ) 
      10•5 months ago

      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).

      •  palordrolap   ( @palordrolap@kbin.run ) 
        5•5 months ago

        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.

  •  Daeraxa   ( @Daeraxa@lemmy.ml ) 
    27•5 months ago

    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-server seems 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.

  •  boredsquirrel   ( @boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net ) 
    17•5 months ago

    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.

  •  Norah - She/They   ( @princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English
    7•5 months ago

    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…

  •  sping   ( @sping@lemmy.sdf.org ) English
    5•5 months ago

    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.