Playing Around With Ubuntu's Snaps, On Fedora

[pythoneer]

Article didnt mention that Dell, Samsung, The Linux Foundation and some others are collaborating on snaps with Canonical, they obviously see the future in snaps. File size is not an issue in 2016, we dont have 20 GB disks any more, and even if one runs a ultrabook with 128 or 256 GB SSD that is still more than enough to use snaps for your favorite applications. What is 5 or 10 GB of disk space in 2016 compared to ever fresh applications? Nothing at all.

Lets say you have 15 of this Applications installed and want to update them. You can go with 16.5 Gb of update size or 2.3 Gb and please don't say download sizes doesn't matter ... i don't want to wait 7 times longer for my updates to finish downloading. So when you have Flatpak as alternative that has smaller file sizes and is more secure, why choose snap over Flatpak?

[r_a_trip]

In the last couple of hours i see snap beeing covered on many popular Tech Sites that "praise" snap and don't even mention its alternatives.

I can only see this as a Canonical PR offensive to force their Snap format at the forefront. If the so called supporting distributions are in fact as surprised of lending support as the rest of the world is about this announcement, then you know something fishy is going on.

Canonical's future is hinged on getting developers to develop against their SDK's. Snap is a central part of their converged initiative. Without a market teeming with Snaps, their phone/tablet OS is definitely dead. The desktop has become a Phone/tablet addon for Canonical, so no snaps, no viable desktop.

I can only see this as trying to outmanoeuvre flatpack (which does have community support) to solidify Canonical's own position.

[Cerberus]

Lets say you have 15 of this Applications installed and want to update them. You can go with 16.5 Gb of update size or 2.3 Gb and please don't say download sizes doesn't matter ... i don't want to wait 7 times longer for my updates to finish downloading. So when you have Flatpak as alternative that has smaller file sizes and is more secure, why choose snap over Flatpak?

Not every application will be 1.1 GB, Krita snap has 102.6 MB, most applications are likely to be in 100-200 MB range, big applications like LibreOffice and Gimp might reach 1 GB or so, lastly not all of them will be updated at the same time which means it is highly unlikely you will update more than 1 or 2 snaps at the same time. Your example would presume all developers update their applications at the same time which does not happen at all. Download sizes will increase but not as much as you implied because they are not updated at the same time.

[schmidtbag]

Seems to me that Snap is really only practical when installing closed-source software or software that is very picky about libraries. Otherwise, it seems to be throwing away one of the primary benefits of using modern Linux OSes with proper package managers. What's the point of a system built around shared libraries when each application carries their own? If I wanted each program to supply it's own libraries, I'd use Windows.

[Maxjen]

LibreOffice Flatpack: 156 MBs

LibreOffice AppImage: 246 MB

LibreOffice snap: 1.1 GB

Does AppImage also have runtimes like Flatpak or why is it so much smaller than Snap?

[LinAGKar]

Shocked by the snap package size? What did you expect? Isn't the point of snappy that it includes all dependencies of the app it installs, so that there are no problems with missing conflicting library versions and stuff like that?

Then you'd expect Appimage to be the biggest though.

[Cerberus]

Seems to me that Snap is really only practical when installing closed-source software or software that is very picky about libraries. Otherwise, it seems to be throwing away one of the primary benefits of using modern Linux OSes with proper package managers. What's the point of a system built around shared libraries when each application carries their own? If I wanted each program to supply it's own libraries, I'd use Windows.

Updates and portability, snaps enable you to update applications without PPAs and without waiting for the next OS version to get you all the new software, it also makes life a lot easier for developers as they can pack a snap and have it working almost anywhere.

[pythoneer]

Not every application will be 1.1 GB, Krita snap has 102.6 MB, most applications are likely to be in 100-200 MB range, big applications like LibreOffice and Gimp might reach 1 GB or so, lastly not all of them will be updated at the same time which means it is highly unlikely you will update more than 1 or 2 snaps at the same time. Your example would presume all developers update their applications at the same time which does not happen at all. Download sizes will increase but not as much as you implied because they are not updated at the same time.

What does the actual size of an application has to do with my example, that was an example. It still holds that snaps are using significantly more space than Flatpaks. And what does the time when the updates are fetches has to do with the downloaded size and the overall update time? 16.5 Gb are 16.5 Gb regardless if all packages are updated now or further apart it adds up to 16.5 Gb and 7 x more time to wait for it to finish. Regardless when exactly they are updated or not. Every point still holds.

[pythoneer]

Updates and portability, snaps enable you to update applications without PPAs and without waiting for the next OS version to get you all the new software, it also makes life a lot easier for developers as they can pack a snap and have it working almost anywhere.

But why not using Flatpak. It has all the same properties and adding smaller file size and more security, easier update of significant librarys the application is using preventing security holes being unfixed.

[blackout23]

Michael: Run "snap find" instead of "snap find *" and you see more snaps.

Why shouldn't snappy be able to declare runtimes or frameworks that apps use?