There's no need to snap
this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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Femcel: I will flatten you if you disagree with me <3
Depending on the mechanism it may not be so bad.
now would you like to be smushed by femcel with a forklift with or without a forklift certification?
Distro wars are silly. If someone is happy using Ubuntu, I'm happy they're a linux user.
Same as the Unix wars and Vim vs. Emacs.
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Don't snap at me, but it would be more apt of you to make a flat pack, or create an app image, or you might get stuck in a tar ball.
Snaps make sens from the Ubuntu side.
Only one package to maintain for an application, even if they have different distributions to maintain. If snap is officially supported by the creator of the application, then it's less work for Canonical. Well, it would have make more sens if flatpak didn't exist.
From user side, it makes way less sens :
- the closed source application shop
- if snaps are not officially supported, then Canonical try to create one, and they may be not that great ...
- ...
I'd say snaps are aimed at servers. A big aspect of both Flatpaks and Snaps is the whole sandboxed environment thing.
I think that's a major reason Canonical flubbed snaps, is they shoved them down the throats of casual users instead of focusing on using them in server situations where you want things more "locked down."
Once again, it does seem silly that they reinvented the wheel, but I mean, that's actually really common. So common there is an XKCD comic about it. So due to how commonplace such a thing is, it seems weird to attack Canonical so much over it.
it seems weird to attack Canonical so much over it.
I mean, on the technical side, sure. Canonical's technical choice is just weird. Plenty of fully open app store environments have almost no competition, because self hosting is still hard work.
But all of the business reasons - for having a closed proprietary sole app server - go against everything that Canonical used to claim they stood for.
Canonical's business choice not to open source the snap servers is an open declaration of war against the FOSS community who have previously rallied around them.
It's like inviting someone into my basement and locking the door with a key as they get to the bottom step. The action isn't illegal, but the probable motive is creepy as fuck. (Maybe I just watch too many horror movies. Lol.)
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It's also inaccurate to say that they reinvented the wheel since snaps predate flatpaks.
Yall wonder why the desktop Linux community hasnβt grown as much as you wish and then upvote stuff like this
The constant superiority struggles do nothing but alienate most computer users
I'm not sure that's why.
My two cents: I got really annoyed with windows after a random update pushing stuff I don't want or need, so I spun up Ubuntu. I've used a lot in the past, but stopped using it because of anti-cheat in some games, got tired of switching whenever I wanted to play.
Coming back, I find out about snaps. Not a good start, but I found instructions to revert to the good old apt packages I wanted. But then I spent way too long trying to coax the taskbar/system/clock to appear where I wanted them to, plus having things working well in my multi monitor setup, and at some point I just went back to Windows.
I couldn't care less about distro squabbles, but I do care greatly about usability and polish, and it seems like we're taking steps back here.
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I still use Ubuntu server. Itβs not nearly as atrocious as Ubuntu desktop.
I use Ubuntu desktop for my server! What can I say? I installed it one night on my desktop to see how it felt and my experiment turned into an entire fucking server because "already here. More convenient."
A "server" is just a remote computer "serving" you stuff, after all. Although, if you have stuff you would have trouble setting up again from scratch, I'd recommend you look into making at least these parts of your setup repeatable, be it something fancy ala Ansible, or even just a couple of bash scripts to install the correct packages and backing up your configs.
Once you're in this mindset and take this approach by default, changing machines becomes a lot less daunting in general. A new personal machine takes me about an hour to setup, preparing the USB included.
If it's stuff you don't care about losing, ignore everything I just said. But if you do care about it, I'd slowly start by giving from the most to least critical parts. There's no better time to do it than when things are working well haha!
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I use both, the only other distros I've used are Raspberry Pi OS and Raspbian. What am I missing out on? Ubuntu desktop seems fine to me, I'm hoping to transition all my machines to Ubuntu desktop before windows 10 EoL. Unfortunately I still have to keep a windows machine around, there are multiple pieces of software I need for work that are windows only.
Please don't kill me I'm just a noob who doesn't know any better.
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Ubuntu Server LTS releases are unbelievably good. They are absolutely solid as a rock. I've had several VMs running it for almost a decade with zero issues.
Ubuntu desktop doesn't suit my use case though,and nor does Gnome.
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I use Kubuntu LTS. Went with --minimal-install. No snap to worry about from the get-go.
good tip
What happened to Ubuntu?
It's popular and widely used so people naturally hate it.
forcing snaps on people (if you apt-get firefox it'll install the snap even though you didn't install it with snap), adding ads for it, snap having a proprietary backend, snap being essentially just a fundamentally worse version of flatpak.
the only advantage i've heard for snap is that it's easier to package for.
Plus I think if you want the advantages of a stable release, easy for user, distro, they'll also need to be immutable now, what's the usecase for a non-immutable, stable, easy to use distro?
If you didn't care about ease of use, you wouldn't want immutable, but if you do, you absolutely do.
If you don't care about stability, you might not care about immutable, but if you do, you absolutely do.
Ubuntu seems like a prime usecase for an immutable distro, but it isn't for tradition-related reasons rather than it actually being good for users.
Snap is also useful for server software and it can apparently be used for more low level things such as drivers. Still, it being properiatary is enough for me to avoid it completely.
Ubuntu Core is the way Ubuntu's doing immutability. They've already got tech demos of Ubuntu Core Desktop, but designing a distro around interchangeable parts with immutability and the ability to have airgapped networks that can still get updates is a nontrivial task. But it depends on things that snaps can do that Flatpak was never designed to do.
Can you explain any of those things? I've never understood the appeal and was just kinda hoping they'd let snap die.
Ubuntu Core works by having everything on the system, kernel included, be a snap. Or, as another way of describing the same thing, everything on the system is installed by mounting a squashfs image (which by its nature is read-only) and applying groups to the processes in those images. This applies all the way down to the level of the kernel, although a kernel snap, on install or upgrade, does write out to a boot partition.
The net result is that you get many of the benefits of immutability, but also many of the benefits of traditional distros. For example, you can replace the kernel snap (and even build your own kernel snap if you choose) without replacing the rest of the base system, since the kernel is installed separately from the base. This is especially important for non-x86 systems that may need different (mutually incompatible) kernel builds for different SOCs, but even on x86 an example of replacing parts like that is NVIDIA drivers. But you don't need a separate version of cups just because you have an Nvidia GPU. And because cups is in its own snap, it's isolated too. You get the same benefits of confinement that applies to desktop apps, but for services, where it can be even stricter. After all, cups doesn't need to even know that you have a GPU, so an attack vector of hacking cups and then using it to attack your GPU gets foiled in a way that an immutable base with unconfined services doesn't.
And that's one of the annoying things about snap: It's fundamentally a nice system with neat capabilities but it's spoiled by Canonical's proprietary backend.
There was an open backend for a while. A complete lack of interest killed it.
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I'm yet to have an issue with snaps while using Ubuntu
I mean, my distro's technically an Ubuntu variant, but I honestly don't think that's ever come up in any meaningful way.
Oh you mean South African Debian. Yeah that's a popular mod, I guess.
Ubuntu is ok. That's it. Let them get on with their life. An OS is a tool that shouldn't get in the way of the user of trying to achieve a goal. If Ubuntu works for them, Ubuntu is good. Linux has to be a solution, a way to a goal not the actual goal.
Sorry, there's one thing about the OS|software|product|company|person|car that we don't like, so we all have to glom on, downvote it to the basement and tell you why we hate it so much.
/s
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Here to represent the Arch Linux master race!
lolsteamos
I use Arch btw :3
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