Snapcraft 6.0 Coming To Finally Move From Ubuntu 18.04 To 20.04 LTS Base, Phase Out i386

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Snapcraft 6.0 Coming To Finally Move From Ubuntu 18.04 To 20.04 LTS Base, Phase Out i386

Canonical is preparing to soon release Snapcraft 6.0 as the latest version of their utility for packaging and distributing Snaps, the Ubuntu-preferred route for sandboxed apps...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Snapcraft-6.0-Coming

[royce]

Flamewar in 3, 2, 1...

[muddymind]

Snapcraft has the downside of bloating the installation sizes but honestly I think this is the only viable way to fix the mess that is linux fragmentation and allow the distribution of universal packages.

Even Linus agrees that the fragmentation is a mess:

[user1]

If they remove i386 support from Snapcraft itself, what is going to be their solution to 32 bit software in case they will want to remove the few remaining i386 packages again? You can't rely on the older Snapcraft forever.

[RahulSundaram]

Snapcraft has the downside of bloating the installation sizes but honestly I think this is the only viable way to fix the mess that is linux fragmentation and allow the distribution of universal packages.

Even Linus agrees that the fragmentation is a mess:

Snap is one of the solutions that tries to solve the problem along with Flatpak, AppImage etc. Snap current usage however is inherently tied to a proprietary backend server.

[iskra32]

Snapcraft has the downside of bloating the installation sizes but honestly I think this is the only viable way to fix the mess that is linux fragmentation and allow the distribution of universal packages.

Even Linus agrees that the fragmentation is a mess:

Snap does fix a real problem, the issue is that snap *far* inferior to Flatpak in terms of the design philosophy and architecture, and Flatpak generally does a better job of being the "linux way" of next-gen packaging techniques. The main point here is the fact that its decentralized, e.g Fedora runs its own flatpak server that you may use instead of flathub should you desire. But there are other benefits, for example flatpak heavily discourages bundling dependencies, has better image formats(the horrid squashfs bundles of snap vs OSTree and OCI for flatpak depending on your usecase). The use of OSTree also dedupes runtimes, which defeats a major criticism of next gen packaging techniques. Flatpak's idea of layering runtimes is also better than what Snap does, as this allows for further deduping and for saving time in maintaining the individual application. You can hypothetically have a Wine runtime built on a Freedesktop runtime with 10 different and isolated applications using these runtimes on Flatpak, all while deduping the runtimes both on RAM and on disk. Snap also doesn't discourage bundling libraries, which is a horrible practice for a variety of reasons that should be avoided unless it is impossible to do so.

[DanL]

When you people quote something with an image, do you really have to post the image again? That is really annoying and just wastes space and creates visual noise.

[uid313]

I hope this brings a new version of the GNOME runtime, the existing runtime in Snap is very old, it is for GNOME 3.28.

[Vistaus]

Snap does fix a real problem, the issue is that snap *far* inferior to Flatpak in terms of the design philosophy and architecture, and Flatpak generally does a better job of being the "linux way" of next-gen packaging techniques. The main point here is the fact that its decentralized, e.g Fedora runs its own flatpak server that you may use instead of flathub should you desire. But there are other benefits, for example flatpak heavily discourages bundling dependencies, has better image formats(the horrid squashfs bundles of snap vs OSTree and OCI for flatpak depending on your usecase). The use of OSTree also dedupes runtimes, which defeats a major criticism of next gen packaging techniques. Flatpak's idea of layering runtimes is also better than what Snap does, as this allows for further deduping and for saving time in maintaining the individual application. You can hypothetically have a Wine runtime built on a Freedesktop runtime with 10 different and isolated applications using these runtimes on Flatpak, all while deduping the runtimes both on RAM and on disk. Snap also doesn't discourage bundling libraries, which is a horrible practice for a variety of reasons that should be avoided unless it is impossible to do so.

I agree. Flatpak is much better than Snap. In fact: even AppImage is better than Snap.

[nado]

Flamewar in 3, 2, 1...

I'd guess that over half of the comments on these posts are useless flamewars.