Ubuntu 23.10's New Software App Will Demote DEBs (Apparently) - OMG! Ubuntu
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A new 'app store' is expected to ship as part of Ubuntu 23.10 when it's released in October — and it'll debut with a notable change to DEB support. Don't

A new ‘app store’ is expected to ship as part of Ubuntu 23.10 when it’s released in October — and it’ll debut with a notable change to DEB support.

  • Avid Amoeba
    9•1 year ago

    Because maintaining snaps is a lot less work for whoever maintains the package, upstream developers, volunteers, or Canonical. If I’m shipping software for Ubuntu and I can use snap, I sure as hell will use it instead of deb.

    • Justin
      7•1 year ago

      Flatpaks are so much better than snaps. There’s nothing that Snaps can do that Flatpaks can’t do better, aside from CLI tools. But CLI tools should just be in Docker anyways.

      • @[email protected]
        4•1 year ago

        Flatpak is mainly for packaging desktop apps, whilst snap can update the entire distro (kernel, mesa, system apps, cli). Snap does things Fedora needs rpm-ostree for.

        In my opinion docker isn’t as useful for cli tools. I need easy access to many little tools, and this results in me having one container with everything. But that doesn’t work well with network capture etc. In the end being able to install packages system wide quickly is really useful.

        • Avid Amoeba
          1•1 year ago

          Exactly. Docker is very much not an appropriate tool for “CLI apps.”

            • Avid Amoeba
              1•1 year ago

              You could do it of course but it’s far from ideal for the purpose of a general case CLI. Unless your script yourself a wrapper, the invocation is fairly verbose. It also leaves containers behind unless you specifically pass --rm which isn’t default. Then there’s the intricacies of the different ways of passing data to it. Oh and let’s not forget that unless you setup rootless Docker, or you do something dangerous like adding yourself to the docker group, you have to always invoke with sudo. Therefore I wouldn’t say that Docker is an appropriate tool for CLI apps in general. For dependency-bundled CLI apps, Snap doesn’t have these gotchas and is therefore much closer to ideal CLI UX.