As someone pretty new to linux, what’s wrong with snaps? I’ve seen a lot of memes dunking on them but haven’t run into any issues with the couple that ive tried (even had a problem with a flatpack version of a program that the snap version fixed, though I think it may have been related to an intentional feature of flatpacks rather than a bug).
On a technical level, they’ve gotten very capable and in some ways are better than flatpak (packaging CLI software is super easy). Yes in the beginning they were slow but 10 years has passed.
What a lot of users dislike is Canonical not open sourcing the backend that hosts the files. You can always install them locally, similarly to apks on Android. I don’t see it as an issue because once the parent company/organisation dies that’s usually it for the project, be it open source or proprietary.
Snaps also use runtimes based on Ubuntu itself so Canonical dying = losing core functionality that is open source but nobody else will bother to take on that job.
Snap packages have a larger install size, run slower, increase resource usage (so more RAM and CPU cycles), the snap store is a closed source system so you get things like Cryptocoin wallet scams , and personally, I think conceptually snap system leads to poor library maintenance long term
I dislike it for all the technical reasons you listed but could live with it despite that.
The entire reason I don’t install Ubuntu distros for Anyone anymore is that you can tell it specifically you want a deb and it can decide, no, no you don’t, and reinstall snapd and that app as a snap.
That’s ridiculous and against what I view Linux should be.
Having a closed source backend isn’t the reason for malicious packages. There’s a clear distinction between official and unofficial packages, and flathub isn’t immune to this either.
In comparison to flatpak, each runtime (core[number]) is supported for 10 years, so developers aren’t pressured to update it if the app keeps working. The side effect is that over time you will end up with a few extra core snaps on your system but the peace of mind for the maintainers is worth it imo.
We have an entire universe (from snaps up to univere-scale k8s setups) derived from “it works on my machine, so we’ll ship my machine”.
How much bad software isn’t being shook out because it’s kept alive in a container with just the right dependencies to prevent it from activating bugs and bad assertions?
I mainly dislike it because of it spamming the loopback devices. I know you can filter those out but i don’t want to lol. Last time i heard their servers/backend or whatever was also proprietary, but i don’t know if that’s still the case. In general i don’t really understand why you would choose it over flatpak, and i’m not really a flatpak fan either :p
As someone pretty new to linux, what’s wrong with snaps? I’ve seen a lot of memes dunking on them but haven’t run into any issues with the couple that ive tried (even had a problem with a flatpack version of a program that the snap version fixed, though I think it may have been related to an intentional feature of flatpacks rather than a bug).
On a technical level, they’ve gotten very capable and in some ways are better than flatpak (packaging CLI software is super easy). Yes in the beginning they were slow but 10 years has passed.
What a lot of users dislike is Canonical not open sourcing the backend that hosts the files. You can always install them locally, similarly to apks on Android. I don’t see it as an issue because once the parent company/organisation dies that’s usually it for the project, be it open source or proprietary.
Snaps also use runtimes based on Ubuntu itself so Canonical dying = losing core functionality that is open source but nobody else will bother to take on that job.
I’ll just link my comment from the other day: https://lemmy.world/comment/19749012 (also read Morphit’s reply, it gets worse)
Snap packages have a larger install size, run slower, increase resource usage (so more RAM and CPU cycles), the snap store is a closed source system so you get things like Cryptocoin wallet scams , and personally, I think conceptually snap system leads to poor library maintenance long term
I dislike it for all the technical reasons you listed but could live with it despite that.
The entire reason I don’t install Ubuntu distros for Anyone anymore is that you can tell it specifically you want a deb and it can decide, no, no you don’t, and reinstall snapd and that app as a snap.
That’s ridiculous and against what I view Linux should be.
Having a closed source backend isn’t the reason for malicious packages. There’s a clear distinction between official and unofficial packages, and flathub isn’t immune to this either.
In comparison to flatpak, each runtime (core[number]) is supported for 10 years, so developers aren’t pressured to update it if the app keeps working. The side effect is that over time you will end up with a few extra core snaps on your system but the peace of mind for the maintainers is worth it imo.
We have an entire universe (from snaps up to univere-scale k8s setups) derived from “it works on my machine, so we’ll ship my machine”.
How much bad software isn’t being shook out because it’s kept alive in a container with just the right dependencies to prevent it from activating bugs and bad assertions?
It’s also a smaller ecosystem than say flatpak, so it gets less use and less checks on it. Seems less well maintained than APT as well.
I mainly dislike it because of it spamming the loopback devices. I know you can filter those out but i don’t want to lol. Last time i heard their servers/backend or whatever was also proprietary, but i don’t know if that’s still the case. In general i don’t really understand why you would choose it over flatpak, and i’m not really a flatpak fan either :p