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.

  • @MrFagtron9000
    6•10 months ago

    Why do Linux nerds that care about this sort of stuff hate snaps so much?

    Is it the concept of snaps / flatpaks that is the issue or snaps specifically because Canonical is behind them?

    I know literally nothing about how they work except I installed the VLC snap and it’s fine.

    I couldn’t install Parsec (a remote desktop game streaming app) because of a missing dependency (an old version of lib-something codec that wasn’t in my newer version of Ubuntu). I spent like an hour trying to figure out how to take the 18.04 version and add it to 22.10. I don’t know Linux at all so I wasn’t making much progress. Someone, not the developers of Parsec, made a flatpak and it magically worked.

    I was afraid that because the flatpak was made by some random guy I couldn’t really trust it. I looked inside the flatpak and it’s seems to be nothing except for the Parsec deb coming straight from the official Parsec URL and that libcodec thing that was causing a problem.

    So from my perspective, not knowing the technical details or politics, what’s the problem?

    • @[email protected]
      16•10 months ago

      The snap store is proprietary, flatpaks handle the graphical app space better, OCI containers handle the service space better, and really high reported load times.

      Flatpaks are awesome IMHO.

    • @[email protected]
      13•10 months ago
      1. They kinda suck. They take a long time to launch
      2. They are in practice proprietary to Ubuntu so they are not really FOSS
      3. The draw of Ubuntu it is was based on Debian Testing and therefor pretty stable.
      4. It’s Yet Another Containerization stack. We already have flatpack, app image, chroot jails and more.

      Why would a serious user want a psuedo proprietary Nth app containerization platform that sidesteps a serious incubation chain and has poor performance?

      • @MrFagtron9000
        1•10 months ago

        So why do people like flatpacks more than snaps?

        Are snaps really proprietary as in they aren’t open source and Ubuntu would have to license it to someone else to use?

        Are snaps technically inferior in some way?

        What’s an incubation chain?

        Why can’t snaps and flatpack just coexist with no particular one winning?

        One more… I thought app image already sort of lost this battle to flatpack and snaps? Or is app image that thing that will let you just launch a program immediately like you can launch a .exe file on Windows?