Playing Around With Ubuntu's Snaps, On Fedora

[Cerberus]

Without a market teeming with Snaps, their phone/tablet OS is definitely dead.

That is not really correct at the moment, you will soon be able to install X applications on Ubuntu phones, tablets already can, phones and tablets will switch to Snappy base in the future, not now, they dont even use snaps now, they use click packages and X applications are installed via libertine and puritine libraries.

[monraaf]

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

I was about to say. Michael basically ran "snap find <everything in his home folder>". A silly little misstep.

[Cerberus]

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.

It does hold if you twist words, when you download daily updates you wont see a huge increase in download size, overall size is not important, we arent on limited bandwidths anymore, so why should I care if I download additional gigabytes in a certain period? What users dont want is downloading much more every day when they update, and that would not happen because applications are not updated at the same time. Daily size is not much bigger, that is the only thing users might care about, and even that only if they are on slow connections. It is not like users stare at the monitor while updates are downloading, doing absolutely nothing.They do other things unless you are the type that likes staring at the updating process and not doing anything else while it is downloading, 99% of users dont do that, they surf the Internet, chat on Skype, listen to music etc.

[Cerberus]

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.

Snaps will have maximum security with Unity 8 and Mir, same as flatpak with Wayland, obviously Ubuntu and embedded users will benefit the most from them in the future, with X11 they will offer benefits but with drawbacks of X11 vulnerabilities. Developers will likely target both in the long run.

[pythoneer]

It does hold if you twist words, when you download daily updates you wont see a huge increase in download size, overall size is not important, we arent on limited bandwidths anymore, so why should I care if I download additional gigabytes in a certain period? What users dont want is downloading much more every day when they update, and that would not happen because applications are not updated at the same time. Daily size is not much bigger, that is the only thing users might care about, and even that only if they are on slow connections. It is not like users stare at the monitor while updates are downloading, doing absolutely nothing.They do other things unless you are the type that likes staring at the updating process and not doing anything else while it is downloading, 99% of users dont do that, they surf the Internet, chat on Skype, listen to music etc.

Ok i see. Snap is only for US citizens because US citizens are not limited by bandwidths. But i'll guess other people (95% of the world population) is seeing this differently. I live in Germany and people have bandwidth limitations. Throughput and/or max num of Gb per month. I am not one of them but they exist. Daily size is much bigger and while you are updating significantly more data, your awesome Youtube session or skype can be disrupted. Sry but i can't really understand how anyone cannot not see the disadvantage in this.

[blackout23]

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.

Who exactly says that people can't use Flatpak?

[caligula]

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?

The solution is a faster internet for you. I'm pretty sure 24 to 100 Mbps is the standard these days. Power users use 1 to 10 Gbps fibre. 16,5 Gb per week is totally acceptable, that's what Arch/Gentoo users download every week anyways. The biggest advantage is that your apps work perfectly and don't fail due to bad dependencies. The dependencies get full treatment by the testing department.

[boudewijnrempt]

I don't care about wayland, I don't care about mir, I don't care about those so-called "security issues" when snap is running on X11, I think whining about package sizes is dumb and whining about how it's harder to keep systems updated with the latest libraries is dumber. I care about getting my application in the hands of users. Michael Hall created a snapcraft file for Krita in his spare time, with two or three iterations it worked, and all I as an application author has to do is run the script and upload the result to the app store. And now the result runs in lots of other distributions! Magic! I'm very happy -- though the official way of distributing Krita for Linux will remain appimages.

[caligula]

Ok i see. Snap is only for US citizens because US citizens are not limited by bandwidths. But i'll guess other people (95% of the world population) is seeing this differently. I live in Germany and people have bandwidth limitations. Throughput and/or max num of Gb per month. I am not one of them but they exist. Daily size is much bigger and while you are updating significantly more data, your awesome Youtube session or skype can be disrupted. Sry but i can't really understand how anyone cannot not see the disadvantage in this.

Ordinary users are consumers, they don't produce content and don't need office suites. Maybe for some essays in school, but not that often. They'd probably use google/microsoft cloud office anyways.

[DIRT]

Some form of QoS or throttling for downloads would be nice to have. Its fine to download more as long as it doesn't interrupt what you are doing. Some of us like to play video games online with as low latency as possible. (Faster internet isn't always the answer, large parts of usa cant get over 1-4mb if they can get it at all. And satellite sucks.)