Canonical To Work On Improving Snap Support Across Linux Distributions

[botipua22]

I have a free Oracle Cloud VPS with Ubuntu and use some cli/server snaps like redis, certbot, pngquant, etc. Wish more packages were available as snaps. Not a big fan of snaps for desktop apps. Flatpaks are great on my laptop running Fedora.

[oiaohm]

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?

Lot of it is don't reinvent the wheel.

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-nspawn.html

You will find that a lot of different thing support the Open Container Initiative (OCI) format.

A raw OCI container does not have all those extras. Also a lot of people miss for moving flatpak applications between systems you can bundle everything up into single file that is OCI format.

Like I don't see Kubernetes or podman adding snap support any time soon as a source of services. Both Kubernetes and podman support OCI as a source.

[jaypatelani]

If community wants to stop these wars we should focus on replacing all OS components to GPLv3 so new development won't be commercial focused 😅

[Daktyl198]

Lot of it is don't reinvent the wheel.

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-nspawn.html

You have to find some irony in saying "lot of it is don't reinvent the wheel", and then linking to another project that is not only made by the same people who make Flatpak (so they did the work anyway) but that is also itself a reinvention of a wheel.

The rest of your message (with OCI stuff) is informative.

[bumblebritches57]

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

Snap makes firefox unbareable, fuck snap and fuck firefox; this is why I use Chrome on linux and Safari on MacOS.

[tenplus1]

I would much rather they didn't mess with other distributions at all, this is why I use flatpak since it works well and doesnt force itself onto your Os.

[ssokolow]

Because that's what enterprise customers want. You think Canonical is still around decades later because they cater to random Linux users? Either way, it amazes me that people talk shit about Canonical in every Phoronix thread that mentions them, then turn around and suck the toes of the IBM-owned Red Hat who's done more harm to the Linux desktop than Canonical by a mile. They just have a better PR team than Canonical who focuses on their own business, and RH pushes their shit out to every distro by making it required (e.g. making systemd required by Gnome and PulseAudio).

I'm reminded of a post over on Hacker News where the poster was saying that their company had talked to Canonical about how to to do some kind of TLS cert thing they needed for their intranet and the answer was basically "Build your own custom base snap and a patched version of snapd which uses it rather than hard-coding the one from our repo."

[ssokolow]

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?

That's like asking how to get ARM chips by buying smartphones and stripping them down. Flatpak is a wrapper around OSTree to add those things. OSTree is what's intended to be equivalent to unconstrained snaps, with systemd's cgroups security features being intended to re-add the security for daemons.

(Try running systemd-analyze security. The results you'll see are what that recent post about Red Had working to improve defaults was about.)

systemd even supports running daemons out of disk images if you want to distribute a Snap/Docker-esque self-contained cross-distro daemon package.

[ssokolow]

Snap makes firefox unbareable, fuck snap and fuck firefox; this is why I use Chrome on linux and Safari on MacOS.

What does Google's magic built-in-trackers browser have to do with anything? The Snap, Flatpak, and tarball releases are all official Mozilla builds.

[ssokolow]

I would much rather they didn't mess with other distributions at all, this is why I use flatpak since it works well and doesnt force itself onto your Os.

Somehow, I'm getting Battlestar Galactica "all of this has happened before. and all of this will happen again" vibes from this announcement:

https://kamikazow.wordpress.com/2018/06/08/adoption-of-flatpak-vs-snap-2018-edition/

(TL;DR: Almost a decade ago, Canonical more or less code-dropped Snap support on a bunch of other distros and then left it to bit-rot when those distros didn't immediately jump with excitement to maintain it.)

See also https://happyassassin.net/posts/2016...da-department/