Could someone ELI5 whats wrong with snaps? I see hate for them all over the place but as an end user with little technical knowledge of linux packaging they seem fine? I can install them and use them, they don’t appear to have any anti-FOSS gotchas, so whats the big deal?
The server isn’t open source, so Canonical has the sole ability to control snap distribution. It’s also yet another example of Canonical’s “Not Invented Here” syndrome, where they constantly reinvent things so they can control it instead of working with the rest of the open source community. They also trick you into using snaps; for example if you explicitly tell it to use apt to install Firefox, it’ll install it as a snap anyways.
Historically they performed really poorly as well, but my understanding is that they’ve largely fixed that issue.
there was a time when they were slow, but that’s mostly been resolved.
but it’s really just a cult thing now. people hate snaps because they think they’re supposed to hate snaps.
I think it’s another fine example of Canonical pushing its own products rather than supporting and enhancing existing standards (flatpak and appimage), which people are getting tired of. Also, as I understand it, the snap store itself is proprietary and is therefore controlled by Canonical.
