I haven’t used Ubuntu for a long time, and I’ve already seen the news that Ubuntu won’t prioritize Flatpak. I think Snap is fully integrated with Ubuntu. Why don’t people like it? I recently installed Ubuntu and I wonder what the reason for the dislike is.
I really enjoy snaps, they gave vastly improved. It’s great having the greatest and latest without to use PPAs and breaking my system.
- It’s forced upon me.
- It auto-updates, sometimes breaking stuff.
- It creates a Snap folder in my home directory.
They’re a lot better these days, but snaps got a reputation early on for being really slow and bloated, and IIRC there isn’t a (good) way to host your own repo which puts a lot of control in Canonical’s hands.
My main reason is that it’s built for a single package repository – basically making it a separate garden.
I mean you can change the “store”, but let’s say you do: then you cannot install packages from the first repo as you can only have one repository active at a time. And because Canonical’s is the largest, it’s not very feasible to provide an alternative.
Btw, can you find out how its changed? Last time I checked it wasn’t too easy.
Contrast this with flatpak where basically anyone can provide packages. There are no walls between repos. It’s the intended use case.
Indeed to me it seems Canonical is aspiring to become the appstore for Linux with Snap whereas flatpak implements the values of open source community, not monopolistic ones. I don’t know of any technical benefits Snap has over Flatpak; perhaps there are some?
Though if I have some misconseptions about Snap, I’m happy to be educated :).
A mix of misinformation, some bugs and a lot of strong feelings.
