Canonical Continues Snap'ing Up Linux Gaming For Ubuntu

[skeevy420]

Snap?!?
Crapple
PopOS

[Malsabku]

* people hate snap
* not everything is open source
* not every software is popular enough to get distro maintainer attention
* many complex software is a hassle to compile outside "intended" way
* many distro don't have enough maintainer maintaining every software ever created
* thanks to canonical nagging, companies think snap is "the right way" to distribute software, which performs badly on Ubuntu itself, let alone on different distro

Hate is always a bad argument.

Ubuntu made a lot of improvement for Snaps in the past months and is in most areas now on a par with Flatpak on the Desktop. And Snap/Flatpak is the solution to many problems you mentioned.

[abu_shawarib]

The fact Snaps get more hate then Flatpak should make them think. They are very similar from a user perspective, but there are two key differences: Canonical had to start something new and not use what is already there and (this is what got me): they start to force it down peoples throat.

What was already there and could achieve the functionality provided by snaps?

[Malsabku]

The fact Snaps get more hate then Flatpak should make them think. They are very similar from a user perspective, but there are two key differences: Canonical had to start something new and not use what is already there and (this is what got me): they start to force it down peoples throat.
There are guides out there on how to install firefox without snap in Ubuntu 22.04. And you need it, because sudo snap remove firefox and sudo apt install firefox will NOT install firefox from apt..

Competition is good for business.

Linux always had many package systems and will have many package systems. Diversity is the strength of Linux. Canonical's development for Snap also improved the development of Flatpak (e.g. Native Messaging API).

People hate Snaps mainly because they are uninformed and their knowledge on Snaps is outdated. The main reason is that Canonical's marketing was bad. They should provide Firefox only as snap when it is on par with the deb. Now it is on par with the deb, but most people don't know that. All beginnings are difficult. My only criticism with snap is that it also should allow other repository owners.

[JPFSanders]

Competition is good for business.

it also should allow other repository owners.

You said it.

Flatpack it is.

[ssokolow]

Thanks for the explanation, but it's not my fault and I didn't ask to sandbox my apps, in fact I'm very much against it.

Flatpak is fundamentally going to have sandbox-like behaviour in *some* form. It's a side-effect of the overlay filesystem approach it takes to merging together your filesystem and the Flatpak runtime's filesystem.

flatpak override --user <APPID> --filesystem=home should do the trick for un-sandboxing your home directory. Replace home with host if you want to un-sandbox as much of the filesystem as possible. (Remove the --user if you're operating on an application that was installed system-wide instead of per-user. If you're not sure, Flatseal gives you a GUI where you can just pick the app and click a toggle switch to enable home or host.)

[ssokolow]

[TABLE]People hate Snaps mainly because they are uninformed and their knowledge on Snaps is outdated. The main reason is that Canonical's marketing was bad. They should provide Firefox only as snap when it is on par with the deb. Now it is on par with the deb, but most people don't know that.

Does it still clutter up the mount output or have they set up cgroups namespacing for that like Flatpak does?

Also, they fundamentally can't catch up to Flatpak without a rearchitecting because they're using compressed filesystem images rather than a Git-like repo, which limits their ability to deduplicate at a more granular level and to do the decompression once on installation. (Compression should be the responsibility of the filesystem you install to in a situation like this.)

[kylew77]

Its pretty much evident canonical is nagging other companies to distribute their software with only snap and call it "app support for linux"

This is what I fear about the app image, flatpack, and snap world is that it will make software harder and harder to package for other operating systems, namely the 4 *BSDs but also other niche OSes like Haiku and the like.

[stiiixy]

Firefox is available as distro packages (outside of Ubuntu), Flatpak and tarball as well. And the tarball is self-executable and self-updating, so no need to compile or anything.

Oooh, I never knew aboit the self-exe/updating t-balls. Thanks for the juicy tidbit.

[mercster]

Ive been running Linux since the early 90s. Slackware was the new kid on the block.

Then things moved forward, but the "cool kids" thought Slackware was best cuz it didn't have this pesky, fascist "package management." That's for wimps! Tarballs 4 lyfe!

Then once everything had levelled out, all the "cool kids" moved to distros like Gentoo, cuz "We're experts, we build every single package ourselves with -O999999 for speed."

Then some very smart engineer designed systemd in response to the increasing complexity and required integration of systems doing ACTUAL important stuff. And a bunch of "cool kids" decided that was crap. Because they had never done anything serious with Linux, had never had to manage a large datacenter with many moving parts, and mostly spent their time tweaking God-knows-what for no reason.

Also, all along, there has been this undercurrent of "cool kids" who refuse to run the two most stable and sane Linux distributions (Ubuntu and Fedora) because tHeY uSe gRaPhIcAl tOoLs aNd i'M aN eXpErT." Around this time, tiling window managers became hip with the "cool kids", because mouse bad.

Then the cool kids adopted Arch Linux, because it gave you the VERY LATEST VERY LIGHTLY TESTED version of EVERY PACKAGE ON YOUR SYSTEM! OOOOhhh this is so up to date all the time, and I even get to write my own /etc/hosts at install time! Now I'm computing with LINUX POWER! (Some halfway sane people came along and made it slightly less retarded to run Arch later on... I guess that's awesome?)

Then the "cool kids" started branching out into these other distros for God knows what reasons, Pop_oS!, this that and the other thing. At this point I stopped even trying to keep up with why idiotic stuff was being done. As a 45 year old man who has worked in IT for over 25 years, and held many positions doing admin/development support for UNIX systems and Linux servers, this is all clearly over my head, and I'm a stupid newbie for using Ubuntu.

LOL BRO DO YOU EVEN BUILD YOUR OWN KERNEL?? Yeah "bro", I was building my own 1.1.x development branches every night on a 486DX/33mhz with 4M ram every few days, it was great. You got to set off your `cd /usr/src/linux && make zlilo` every night as you went to bed, and prayed to God the build finished when you woke up in the morning. It took 8 hours to build a kernel. 8 hours.

So yeah, I use pre-built kernels. I like binary packages. I like GUIs! I don't use rolling release distros, because they're idiotic. I get it, you're a hobbyist, you pride yourself on doing things "the hard way." The problem with that is, some people just want their computer to work and do other stuff than diddling with operating systems day in and day out. You're not smarter than everyone else: you've just got more free time, and you don't have anything better to do.

AND NOW! Here's today's story.... EHHHHRRRR MER GEEEERRRD, a snap for gamemode. LULZ'ing ensues.

We're all very impressed, really. I would caution you, however, to try to keep in mind, in these Linux corners of the Internet, where you think you're one of the "coolest kids" in school...

There is likely someone reading who can see through your bullshit. Maybe it's one of those Dunning-Kruger effect things, where you don't know what you don't know. Just letting YOU guys know... it's embarrassing.

You guys have fun.