Canonical To Work On Improving Snap Support Across Linux Distributions

[J.King]

(e.g. making systemd required by Gnome and PulseAudio).

Genuinely curious: in what way do Gnome and PulseAudio require systemd?

[szymon_g]

good, are they going to upstream the apparmor patches so snaps would be actually secure(-ish) on systems other than ubuntu?

[Daktyl198]

Genuinely curious: in what way do Gnome and PulseAudio require systemd?

Gnome requires logind and cgroups, which are implemented on most distros through systemd. Some devs went out of their way to re-implement the features, but only those that really hated systemd. The rest just chose to give in. They added this requirement back when these features were *only* in systemd. The reimplementations came much later.

PulseAudio works without systemd, but it requires systemd for hardware auto-detection and hot-plugging audio devices.

[Daktyl198]

Hello to Canonical PR department! Because no other could spread such blatant lies, like Red Hat harming the Linux Desktop? Seriously? Without Red Hat there would be no Linux desktop at all, period.... Probably not even Linux server to be honest.... Canonical has contributed NOTHING to Linux, they are a disease, they only take from the work of others.

The fact that you're replying this way tells me all I need to know. I urge you to take a real look at the history of software running the Linux desktop. Red Hat took Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and turned it up to 11, and people worship them for it. To be clear, I don't even particularly like Ubuntu or Canonical. I've run Arch or it's derivatives for over 10 years, and it's not like Canonical doesn't make bad decisions. They fucked up by linking to amazon by default in Unity search results. They fucked up with the Ubuntu One service.

They fucked up in a lot of ways, but they are not the devil that Red Hat makes them out to be. Fanboys like you only believe that Canonical is bad because they're a Red Hat competitor, and thus RH slanders them every chance they can.

[Daktyl198]

well they make all money they make by microsoft sending them dollars and their secret mission was always to destroy the linux ecosystem by fragment it.

.RPM vs DEB

snap vs flatpak

microsoft can say: support .exe or .msi or winget with WOW64 and you cover the complete windows ecosystem

they want the linux ecosystem fragmented so that commercial companies avoid to support linux because they do not want to fight over

32bit elf vs 64bit elf and .rpm vs .deb and snap vs flatpak vs appimage...

microsoft makes billions of dollars by sending canonical million of dollars to make sure the linux ecosystem is fragmented.

deb came before rpm, in the form of the debian distrobution. rpm came 2 years later. Then again, both were invented in the mid-90s and there was a lot less standardization happening in that time so I can hardly blame either of them.

snap was developed because Canonical enterprise users looked at flatpak and went "that sandboxing thing looks interesting, but it's implemented like shit and I could never use it on my company's systems" so Canonical had to develop something their customers would actually use. Blame that one on the flatpak developers releasing the standard to the public before putting any actual thought into solving any of it's issues. These days Flatpaks are lot better with portals, but they're still a pain in the ass to use and require way more configuration to set up... if they even work. But back in 2014? LOL no.

The Phoronix forums seriously need to brush up on their history lessons and critical thinking skills.

[Mario Junior]

I did abolish any Canonical linux distro for me and all the people i support after microsoft invested money in this company and did make deals with them.

and i really do not know a single sane person who is not a microsoft minion who say anything good about snaps

so for what exactly do they do this ? the only rational is to sapotage flatpaks to make sure no standard emerge like microsoft windows .exe or .msi or winget -... .exe can be 32bit or 64bit or both WOW64

their argument is always the same if you use windows you know you use .exe or .msi or winget to make your installer and you are done with supporting the complete platform

and on linux you do not know if you use 32bit elf or 64bit elf or .deb or .rpm or snap or flatpag or appimage and so one...

thats why they always sapotage standards for linux hey sabotaged a WOW64 alternative big-elf who could handle 32bit and 64bit at the same time

they sapotaged the unification of .deb and .rpm they also sapotaged linux standard base

and they now sapotage flatpak to become a standard by make it look like snap is a alternative.

is anyone fooled by them ? i don't think so they can go and improve snap just for themself no sane person will ever use it outside of ubuntu

12345

[slalomsk8er]

Here come the trolls. Ubuntu users appreciate the convenience. It's cool that others will get a chance to do as well.

I'm typing this on a Ubuntu Studio install and I despise having to kill Firefox to be able to update it.
Issues are old and a possible solution is proposed but last time I looked it was still not resolved but maybe in the next LTS... or I moved to Guix by then.
Got Flatpak and Guix installed to conveniently get programs or version not in the repository.

[uid313]

Many software are not available in Snap format, and Snap seems rather unsuitable for servers since many software is not available such as Bun (JavaScript runtime), Cockpit (web admin), Apache, Lighttpd, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.

Also if you run Ubuntu Core or Ubuntu Server then there is no remote web UI to install applications, so you have to SSH into the box and run command lines. Imagine if you could use the web browser to install Snap packages.

[rommyappus]

Some people do, as Snap supports some functionality that the Flatpak alternative does not (in particular, server applications).

As some people (and some organizations) prefer (or are required) to run their core OS in an immutable state, being able to update some set of non-core server apps may have some value.

While I have certainly have doubts that there will be much uptake outside the Canonical ecosystems for Snap, making the effort may end up being worth their while if they can convince more (paying) customers to consider Ubuntu as a solution.

I wonder what obstacles lie with flatpak being good for services style of applications? do you know?
Their FAQ lists these reasons:
Can Flatpak be used on servers too?
Flatpak is designed to run inside a desktop session and relies on certain session services, such as a D-Bus session bus and, optionally, a systemd --user instance. This makes Flatpak not a good match for a server.

But I wonder what could be done to make those optional if the app itself doesn't use it, as I imagine most services don't?

[rmfx]

We don't want better snap, we want a f*ing agreement on flatpak so that we can stop wasting resources between grey or gray...