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?
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.
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.”
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.
I keep expecting them to die like Unity DE
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).
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.
Probably along the lines of ‘its bloated and too many dependencies’.
Though most flatpaks use a common base, any modifications on top of that sometimes need to be stored modified (now having 2 or more copies of one dependency)
To anyone that’s not a Linux nerd the app looks about the same size as on all other OS’s, but on Linux it makes it a lot larger than just bare bones installing it via package manager
But on the other hand, it works on all distros.
I think the pros outweigh the cons here, no?
Not for everyone, no. For me, each supposed pro has a corresponding con or is just a no-op:
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Only one package for all distros: Despite what people think, this does not lower the amount of work for the program’s creator, who was never required to create any sort of binary package at all. Furthermore, it means that fewer people are checking the package for faults—that’s part of what distro maintainers do, y’know.
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No external dependencies: Not only does this cause disk bloat, but it means that if the flatpak is no longer updated, the dependencies packaged inside it may not be either . . . which is one of the issues that dynamic linking was supposed to avoid in the first place. Might as well just go old-school and statically link the binary.
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Installations at user rather than system level: Only of value if I don’t have admin authority, and I don’t have to deal with a single system where that’s the case, so this is a no-op.
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Supposedly more rapid updates: I’m running Gentoo, not Debian
fossil:cough: oldstable. If I really want to, I can have my package manager install direct pulls from source control for many packages. New changes every day—beat that, flatpak. Plus, unless there’s been a substantial change to a package’s build method, I can bump actual releases myself just by copying and renaming a small file, then running a couple of commands. -
Sandboxing: As far as I’m concerned, the amount of security added by sandboxing and the amount of security added by the additional scrutiny from the distro maintainers is probably about even (especially since the sandbox, as a non-trivial piece of software, will inevitably contain bugs). And I can can throw firejail on top if I’m worried about something specific (or run it in a VM if I’m really nervous). I can understand why this might be attractive to some people, but for me the weight is very low.
.
So I’m left with avoiding bloat and bugs in flatpak’s system integration vs. a little bit of security gained by additional sandboxing (which I don’t think I really need, because I’m only mid-level paranoid). Thus, I’m not interested in complexifying my update process by incorporating flatpak into my system. Others’ needs may be different.
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Not to mention they are optional and not a replacement for something that worked fine.
That’s stupid. Nothing stops you from just installing regular Ubuntu if you love snaps so much.
Or just installing Snap afterwards
Type this:
apt install firefox
Into your terminal on Ubuntu and you’ll see what is anti-customer.
Yup. I had no problem with snaps or Ubuntu until I saw that underhanded bullshit.
I feel like they shot themselves in the knee. Even if it was buggy I would of still tried to use it for fun. However, when they first came out I found out about them because it caused me to be unable to work. I used apt to install a CLI tool and then the CLI tool wasn’t working. I tried to manually get it from the Ubuntu repo only to discover it was snap only.
It really pissed me off.
I switched to Debian, partly because of snaps, what exactly is going on here with Ubuntu?
You can install Firefox only as a snap on Ubuntu. There’s no native package on the official repo.
corporate linux apologists promoting proprietary ecosystems are still corporate apologists promoting proprietary ecosystems
Wonderfully put! Thanks.
Anti-Snap is pro-consumer. Using Ubuntu at all is anti-consumer, I would rather Mint or just Debian.
That’s an interesting comment from a guy that used to work for Canonical, and then went anti-snap pretty hard, to the point that he made this:
lol, love that
No see he loves snaps so much he made a utility to unistall it To reinstall it again!
Yeah no snaps are a bad format they are not FOSS in my book.
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-serverseems 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.
Yeah I wouldn’t hate snaps if it wasn’t for canonical saying they wouldn’t force them on people, then making
aptinstall snaps instead of .debs without the user asking for it.They won’t open source snaps because they want to control the snap ecosystem to make money off of it for an IPO
I wonder if it probably wouldn’t (or at least wouldn’t have) done any harm to do so seeing as if you look at Flatpak, its most obvious comparison, although it can have multiple remotes, Flathub is the only one that is realistically used and is the de-facto standard.
The more snaps you have, the slower your machine will boot. It’s uniquely shit technology that should die already.
Not wanting to elect dictators is anti-democracy!
Basically the same logic
I don’t think he knows what “anti-consumer” means
I’ll be honest with y’all. If your decision to not buy something from a hardware manufacturer is based on that they’ve modified their optional Ubuntu install, this hardware wasn’t for you to begin with
That was my thought initially as well. Just install the OS you want, how you want.
That’s one of the dumbest things I ever heard
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.
The Venn diagram of supported apps isn’t also a perfect circle. You can’t run VPNs as Flatpaks, and Flathub disallows CLI apps from being submitted (because the UX of using a sandboxed CLI app sucks). Snap doesn’t have these issues.
because the UX of using a sandboxed CLI app sucks
I think it is more because of this issue because as far as I know snaps have some level of sandbox and you can still use CLI apps as you said.
Very interesting read, thanks for the link. This seems like a major shortcoming of flatpak!
This is another issue with:
https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/46
https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak.github.io/issues/191
https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/1651
Others like valve have just ignored the issue for years, but the flatpak devs decided to argue that it doesn’t apply to them, to the point that one even mentioned modifying the spec so that they are exempt…
Yeah that’s solidly it. I use strictly confined CLI snaps all the time. (In fact, I maintain the snaps for a couple of CLI apps.) They work fine as long as the snap has the right plugs.
But I don’t want to have to run
flatpak run dev.htop.htopto get to htop.
No there are many CLI apps on Flathub.
Helix, and others.
Helix opens it’s own GUI when you run it. It’s not a CLI app in the same sense as
git. I’m curious on the others you mention, since as a packager, I’ve seen firsthand CLI apps being declined (or allowed, but only with a hidden status on flathub.org)Interesting. Yes I had some other editor too, it opened a new terminal tab.
There is some flatpak export bin directory where the binaries are, I think you can put that to your PATH and have a pretty good CLI experience.
I think it’s a short term vs long term debate. In the short term snaps are nice. They might help you get that software you want right now. In the long term though, it will only take away some of your rights and make you into a product.
There are also some interesting things to say about wording. Specifically consumer vs user. Software is not consumed, it’s used and depending on the specific software, the user might be abused by the people producing and controlling the software.
I think that phrases like ‘anti-consumer’ can stick to any target, so long as they’re thrown with a sufficient amount of bullshit.
Can you link the original quote? I feel like there is a lot of context missing here.
Sure! I’ve added it to the post as well.
Didn’t bother to follow the thread?
https://mastodon.social/@popey/112593520847827981>
Sure. Other people can do that if they want.
I don’t have a problem with companies bundling whatever packages they want on their distro.
The difference comes when they actively block installation (just like Mint does). That is what is anti-consumer. It adds confusion to users as they have to go and find out what random file in /etc/ needs to be edited or removed, just to install some software. It’s stupid.
You may disagree, that’s fine. It’s okay to not like things.
Did you look at the timestamps? 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.
