Canonical Improving The Thunderbird Snap For Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

[Rovano]

snaps suck cus they are a proprietary format and the backend is fully controlled by canonical and is a closed ecosystem.

Therefore, there are good reasons. You can guess or find on the Internet. Try it. The rest is open. You don't have to use it, but I'm afraid the containers will catch us almost everywhere in the future.

[szymon_g]

I cannot be the only one who is actually quite happy with snaps. Not limited to GUI apps and with a wide variety of available software. Sure they arent perfect but they are good

[Teggs]

Does Shuttleworth ever wonder why Canonical doesn't make money?

[sarmad]

Yesterday: Canonical tells us snaps are great because they save packaging work: https://www.phoronix.com/news/FOSDEM-2024-Snaps


Today: Canonical reinvents the wheel for the 11th time, builds Thunderbird from source into their snap to get back the benefits of packaging yourself (supporting other architectures, compliance with own standards).

Logical disconnect?

Technically, they are not making a new build, they are just replacing the existing deb build with a snap build. Going forward this will save them efforts, because instead of maintaining the package for each version of Ubuntu, they will only maintain a single version which is the snap version. Ideally, they would like the author of Thunderbird to make those builds themselves (also building from source using CI/CD), but I guess developers aren't yet buying into snaps so Canonical is left with having to do it on their behalf. Making snap builds is actually pretty straight forward if your app builds on Ubuntu: you just add a manifest file to your GitHub repo, and then point your account in snapcraft to that repo and that's it. So, yes, Canonical wasn't lying when they said using Snaps will save packaging work. But then I guess using Flatpak also saves a lot of packaging work. I haven't tried Flathub myself, but I would imagine it to be a pretty similar process to Snapcraft.

[ferry]

Eh nah, flatpak is actually good, snaps suck cus they are a proprietary format and the backend is fully controlled by canonical and is a closed ecosystem.

Flatpak is an open ecosystem and the whole stack is fully open source, if you as a developer dont want to use the primary flathub repo you can easily make your own that can be sideloaded with an infinite number of other repos using the official tooling.

Having a cross-distro package format is good (and i would argue a necessity), but snap should not be that format. The whole linux ecosystem should be behind flatpak which embodies the ideals of the linux community and the philosophy of open source, not a proprietary corpo that wants ultimate control.

Sound like you don't know what debs are?

[hedonist]

Maybe they should drop the schnapps, sixpacks and just stay with debs.

Eh nah, flatpak is actually good, snaps suck cus they are a proprietary format and the backend is fully controlled by canonical and is a closed ecosystem.

Flatpak is an open ecosystem and the whole stack is fully open source, if you as a developer dont want to use the primary flathub repo you can easily make your own that can be sideloaded with an infinite number of other repos using the official tooling.

Having a cross-distro package format is good (and i would argue a necessity), but snap should not be that format. The whole linux ecosystem should be behind flatpak which embodies the ideals of the linux community and the philosophy of open source, not a proprietary corpo that wants ultimate control.

[ferry]

Canonical should just drop snap support and focus solely on flatpaks. Snap has no uses anymore.

Maybe they should drop the schnapps, sixpacks and just stay with debs.

[hedonist]

Canonical should just drop snap support and focus solely on flatpaks. Snap has no uses anymore.

[M@GOid]

I am using this layout in Thunderbird. It works very well on screens with low resolution, like the laptop I use at work. People were ripping their panties in anger when it appeared, but I found it very useful.

[Britoid]

Yesterday: Canonical tells us snaps are great because they save packaging work: https://www.phoronix.com/news/FOSDEM-2024-Snaps


Today: Canonical reinvents the wheel for the 11th time, builds Thunderbird from source into their snap to get back the benefits of packaging yourself (supporting other architectures, compliance with own standards).

Logical disconnect?

Distributions should not be packaging non-system third party apps. It's unsustainable and arguably unequal to other applications. You don't see Microsoft packaging Firefox or Apple packaging it.