Ubuntu Details Initial Plans For Immutable Linux Desktop With Ubuntu Core & Snaps

[stompcrash]

Aww. I was getting worried they had forgotten about me.

Arch hasn't.

[uid313]

Flathub has you overed for all 3 cases already.

Yeah, sure, I would be fine with Flatpak too. Either Flatpak or Snap, I don't care, as long as it is sandboxed. Canonical seems to be going for Snap though.

[Vermilion]

The best way to go at this is if Canonical uses Snap for the underlying OS and services, and adopts Flatpak for GUI apps. Flatpak have more momentum in the community, while half the snaps are packaged by Canonical employees (either as Canonical or Snapcrafters).

Doing this would reduce fragmentation and consolidate efforts while mirroring what Fedora, OpenSUSE and Valve do in using their own technologies for the base OS while relying on the community for Flatpaks.

[EphemeralEft]

I don’t personally love Snaps or immutability in general, but I have to admit that this is a good move for Ubuntu. It really fits with their goals of being:

1. Good for beginners (i.e. hard to screw up)
2. Easy to support (i.e. less config variations to worry about)

…And maybe it’ll push more savvy users toward other distros, which would also be good for everyone.

[EphemeralEft]

I'm a big believer of security via obscurity

Obscurity probably helps security, but by itself doesn’t constitute sufficient security; anyone with enough resources (usually just a moderate amount of time or luck) will figure out your obscurity, and then your security will depend solely on whatever other measures you put in place.

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

One Snap to rule them all,ubuntu_ring.png
One Snap to find them,
One Snap to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them.

[Malsabku]

The best way to go at this is if Canonical uses Snap for the underlying OS and services, and adopts Flatpak for GUI apps. Flatpak have more momentum in the community, while half the snaps are packaged by Canonical employees (either as Canonical or Snapcrafters).

Doing this would reduce fragmentation and consolidate efforts while mirroring what Fedora, OpenSUSE and Valve do in using their own technologies for the base OS while relying on the community for Flatpaks.

Canonical should just open Snap, then there would be more contributors too.

[sarmad]

I also wonder if DEBs will still work if needed, because sometimes stuff just isn't available as a SNAP.

If I understand correctly, no, debs won't have any role in Ubuntu Core. This is why Canonical will still provide the classic desktop Ubuntu alongside this snap based Ubuntu. The plan is to eventually make everything available as snaps, but this will take time. You still have some options though:
* Use LXD to create a classic container where you can use DEB. For command line tools this is straight forward, and it's not a VM so there is no performance or memory impact. With GUI apps you need to configure stuff but it's doable.
* Use the `classic` snap to give you a deb enabled env. Not sure how this works as I haven't tried it. For reference: https://askubuntu.com/questions/9029...in-ubuntu-core
* I assume AppImages work. Flatpak is not yet available, but it should be fairly straight forward to add. Hopefully someone takes on that task to make it available.

[procles]

* I assume AppImages work. Flatpak is not yet available, but it should be fairly straight forward to add. Hopefully someone takes on that task to make it available.

Most of them won't though, because Ubuntu stopped shipping libfuse2 by default. In some time all AppImages will be updated, but right now this is a problem.

[ext73]

A very BAD idea !!! closing down the Linux environment is the dumbest solution possible