Canonical To Work On Improving Snap Support Across Linux Distributions

[AKoskovich]

They should instead work on an improved Flatpak support on Ubuntu. That would be more useful. ;-)

Why would it be more useful? In my experience snaps are more reliable than Flatpaks. On Fedora when running flatpaks for Discord, Spotify, Telegram, MS Edge, I see crashes for them pop up all the time. On Ubuntu with snaps, I have rarely ever seen a crash. These are extremely popular applications so the fact they're more stable on snaps than flatpaks is telling.

[AKoskovich]

Flatpak is fully Free software and anyone can host their own repo. Snap has a proprietary backend and is centralized.

Being centralized is a *good* thing. Most normal people do not want a billion different stores to choose their apps from. Proprietary also does not matter to the average desktop user. We have to stop caring so much about "decentralized" and "open source" if we want to actually welcome desktop users to the Linux platform. These do not mean anything to normal people.

[CommunityMember]

It seems nobody cares.

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.

[Awesomeness]

Really surprised hobbyist packagers on other distributions didn't line up to do all that work for free.

[Modu]

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.

There are immutable server distros which are fine without snapd. They use containers for server apps.

[stormcrow]

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

This Ubuntu user didn't appreciate snap's inconvenience in 22.04 so I abandoned ship for other distros. Luckily, it's unlikely other distros not based on Ubuntu will bother with it. To be clear, the politics around snap had nothing to do with my decision. I just don't give a damn about the trolling or apologists support around it. I just can't stand having to wait ages for a web browser to start with snap when it's nearly instantaneous with flatpak. I don't care to go back.

[NeoMorpheus]

Wondering something...

Lets say that Adobe stops getting bribes from Apple and M$ to keep their programs away from Linux, how could Linux make it easy for them to distribute their wares?

RPM, DEB, Snap, Flatpak?

[Yalok]

Are there any plans to open source the snap repo server backend?

On the other hand, I do think Canonical should've learned their lesson by now. Their alternatives are mostly a waste of time and money: bazaar, upstart, ubuntu one, mir, unity..
Except cloud-init, which did become the industry standard, the rest were either abandoned or replaced by more popular software: git, systemd, Wayland, gnome.

With containerd on the servers and flatpack on the desktops being the more popular solutions, I don't see any bright future for snaps.

[DanL]

I just can't stand having to wait ages for a web browser to start with snap when it's nearly instantaneous with flatpak. I don't care to go back.

Yeah, I doubt most users care about flatpak vs. snap, but I wonder how many users Ubuntu drove away with forcing web browser snaps down peoples' throats, especially with Firefox's lousy snap performance and no vaapi in the chromium snap IIRC.

[Ananace]

I wish they'd figure out a better way than mounting a whole bunch of squashfs files for snaps, and also stop trying to call it a cross-distro packaging system when they're not actually supporting it for any other distribution than Ubuntu.

At the university where I work we've literally and repeatedly had to pull both the core networking and server infrastructure teams to help get updated Ubuntu installs running in time for courses to continue working, and snap has been a main contributing factor to the issues in most of the cases. (Not to mention how the fact that they're running their installer as a snap has been causing continuous issues in our automated deployment of Ubuntu systems)