Having observed (well deserved) criticism of both Snap and Flatpak during the years, Flatpak seems to emerge as the most sensible solution, continuously addressing and improving on the pain points and security challenges.<p>I have been using Fedora 34/35 the last year or so, and Flatpaks are well integrated and mostly just works without any performance hit. Being able to adjust permissions per app (with Flatseal) has also been a great experience.<p>I have little experience with Snap, but the few times I have had to deal with it on Ubuntu-based distros, it has left a bad impression from a user perspective.
Users are telling the snap team exactly what they want: give us a way to disable automatic updates. Snappy's vision is to take this control away.<p>This is why people hate snaps. They don't fit user workflows, make extra work and even cause show stopping problems.<p>Snaps could be great but the team really needs to listen. For me I'm removing snaps from my configs before I get surprised.<p>(edit: mobile autocomplete typos)
I warned them <i>half a decade</i> ago on a super-long thread (on that forum, it’s called “External repositories”) that having Canonical in charge of everything, having no support for external repositories, and no ability to disable updates was going to be the death of Snap. They would not listen <i>at all</i> to me or anyone on that discussion. It was nothing but double-down.<p>Well… what, five years later, here we are. They are still trucking on although the Linux community at large has turned against them, yet they remain in their echo chamber of a forum and don’t see it, convinced it will all work out or some crap.
Somehow when googling software snap will often come up and try to push users to install snap and the software.<p>Almost feels like malware on every level. Can't comprehend why they are pushing it so hard.<p>Ubuntu is on borrowed time.
The snap thing makes me want to switch distro (for work) from ubuntu. Unfortunately we have some benefits from using ubuntu as the common platform for less divergence from each other
If you give people tools to enforce their own policies, you have an adaptable system.<p>If you create a set of policies that users can choose from, you have limited your usefulness to just those cases that fit in those policies that you have implemented.<p>If you choose a single policy for everyone, only people who are willing to use that policy will use your system.<p>These patterns repeat across operating systems, services and applications.
I love Ubuntu, it's been my daily driver for over a decade now but if they continue with going against the community on this nonsense this will be a strong indication for people like me that an era has come to an end and it's time to move on.<p>It used to be a community focused distro. This bs feels outright user-hostile.
Can someone explain why I'd use snap or flatpak over the distros repo or manual install for something not in the repo or unavailable via adding a repo? Apart from auto-managed updates.<p>Snap and flatpak are massive compared to "traditional" packages.
I really don't understand all these "flatpak is better" comments. It's not.<p><a href="https://ludocode.com/blog/flatpak-is-not-the-future" rel="nofollow">https://ludocode.com/blog/flatpak-is-not-the-future</a><p>Maybe it is better than snap, but it's not good and its not better than a traditional package, on either philosophical or technical grounds.
Wow. This thread isn't controversial at all. I haven't found a single comment making a case for Snap. It seems to be universally disliked - at least by this crowd.
We use microk8s on our dev clusters and its really great when an automatic upgrade goes sideways. Also using channels didn't help since even a minor upgrade managed to break our setup once.<p>The last half year or so went ok, but not being able to stop automatic upgrades is ridiculous. In general I like opinionated software, but sometimes it goes to far.
Snap developers have refused to rename $HOME/snap to be less visible for nearly as long, they have and are shipping very broken software, all while using update methods that corrupted people's data unannounced until very recently (the update mechanism made data directories non-writable unless you enable some experimental option).<p>They very much do not care about the end-user with Snap, only how to appear attractive to potential customers.
So... I have been using Ubuntu 18.04LTS for my half-dozen servers and was planning to replace them with 22.04LTS later this year. Bad idea?<p>I've tended to use every second LTS release, replacing with new (cloud) servers during the overlap in support periods. I use Ansible to configure.<p>Should I be considering Rocky or straight Debian instead? Something else?
The only thing still keeping me on Ubuntu is the font rendering that somehow looks so much better than any other distro, otherwise I would've already switched to another distro because of snap.<p>I feel like I've never seen anybody actually like snap.
One of a number of reasons Ubuntu does not even meet the minimum requirements to tender for a cut of the millions the University I work for invests in Linux systems (research workstations (often packed with NVIDIA GPUs), clients to control specialist equipment, HPC, regular desktops/laptops/servers, network/lustre/backup storage etc).
Check out how long this flatpak bug was on adding a pin function :)<p><a href="https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/3078" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/3078</a>
Please correct me if I am wrong, but you can simply snap install with a --channel, which could be a specific version. This way it is not auto updating, since it's on that specific channel/version.
> The issue that makes us resist the idea of simply disabling updates altogether is that very often that will mean never update rather than update at someone’s discretion, and then we’re getting back to some of the problems that got us here in the first place.<p>I’m sorry, who owns the machine here?
Where Microsoft leads with its bad ideas Linux distros will follow blindly. The sad thing is those who decried a Microsoft for their evilness of doing things like this are the same ones that have turned right around and started defending it in the name of "users are stupid so give them less freedom".