Canonical Continues Snap'ing Up Linux Gaming For Ubuntu

[mirmirmir]

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.

It's less of an argument, more of a fact. I believe a phoronix reader is smart enough to read other comment on why people hate it.

While I respond to a previous question, you don't even bother to pay attention.

[jorgepl]

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.)

They can catch up. Just use an uncompressed SquashFS image. There's no need for the image to be compressed.

[middy]

I don't like snap. I don't even like flatpak. But I do like appimages. Protonup-qt, wowup, satisfactory-mod-manager and gimp-with-plugins 2.10.25 (arch doesn't build with python support and the aur breaks) are the only containers, and appimages I use. No fuss, just dump them in a folder in my home directory. Run them when I need them.

Reason why I like appimages because they are more similar to a .exe. no repo to deal with it. Just the developer supplies it and you download and run. Flatpak and snap seems like are trying to be a universal package manager with having repos. Rather than just being a simple package you download and run independently that developers can ship as instead of making binaries for each unique distro.

[stiiixy]

Reason why I like appimages because they are more similar to a .exe. no repo to deal with it. Just the developer supplies it and you download and run. Flatpak and snap seems like are trying to be a universal package manager with having repos. Rather than just being a simple package you download and run independently that developers can ship as instead of making binaries for each unique distro.

This is all I ever wanted from them as well. I guess the big boys picked a poison and made it do what they wanted, which also a pro for all camps. Dont make all of them try to be the other AS WELL AS their own thing. The old Unix 'do one thing, do it well' I suppose, although thats not really the reality for a lot of software projects, nor customer/consumer/user expectations.

[mmrezaie]

Really? Can you give an example of such apps?

For starters, juju and lxd. Deploying those without snap requires a lot of work for maintainers. snap on the other hand makes their deployment hard on larger clusters. chicken and egg problem.

[skeevy420]

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?)

Everything you wrote in the 2nd part describes Fedora, too. Except for the slightly less retarded to run part. Omit the words slightly less and you'll be describing Fedora. The Fedora installer is a slow, clunky, horrid mess. Just because it's graphical doesn't make it good. Even the graphical software tool, GNOME Software Center, sucks. Wanna know what you can't install from there? ZS Fucking H. We can't install ZSH from KDE's Discover either. Nope, gotta fire up a terminal and do it that way. So much for Graphical Progress.

At least the Manjaro/Arch Graphical Package Managers show you every package available, every dependency and optional dependency, and every file that will be changed during an update. The Fedora update method of "getting an update notification, watching a progress bar,rebooting, watching another progress bar, rebooting again, and using the system" feels too much like Windows. Screw yer progress bar, tell me what files are changing as they're changing and what might need my attention.

Both Ubuntu and Fedora make stupid decisions that run their users off, Ubuntu halfasses and/or quits things which doesn't inspire long-term confidence, Fedora has one of those draconian and asinine non-free policies that makes day-to-day tasks harder for no reason, and both run GNOME by default while a majority of the Linux world dislikes GNOME and that desktop style.

After a month and a half on Fedora I'm going back to Arch where they ship the packages as vanilla as possible and don't assume defaults so I can make the retarded decisions and not be stuck with the one's the Fedora Committee made for me. It has a saner update system that doesn't take ques from Microsoft Windows.

[ssokolow]

They can catch up. Just use an uncompressed SquashFS image. There's no need for the image to be compressed.

That still doesn't give you the automatic per-file deduplication Flatpak gets from OSTree's "git for the OS" repo structure, where you never re-download portions of a package that you already have and everything on-disk gets hard-linked based on the hash of its contents (sha256sum, I think) at install time.

That's why Flatpak's download size listings are all "up to" values.

[ssokolow]

Reason why I like appimages because they are more similar to a .exe. no repo to deal with it. Just the developer supplies it and you download and run. Flatpak and snap seems like are trying to be a universal package manager with having repos. Rather than just being a simple package you download and run independently that developers can ship as instead of making binaries for each unique distro.

I don't like Appimages because, at least with GOG.com's approach, it's easy to delete the bundled .so file that's causing the game to segfault on startup after a system update because they misjudged what to bundle and what not to bundle. (And I do get at least one game like that with every Kubuntu release upgrade.)

Flatpak and Snap both use a runtime system where the runtime contains all those libraries that may or may not be on the application side of "what is platform and what is bundled dependencies" line and they can update the libraries in the runtime to resolve those sorts of issues.

[rclark]

No axe to grind here. While there may be a tiny delay in loading FireFox, it is hardly noticeable in 22.04 . So I can't say I dislike using snap, I just don't think it was necessary or more complex than it needs to be. And I believe it outside of the normal 'apt' for updating... So it goes.

I use freeCad which is distributed as an appImage. Seems to work well. Easy to use by making executable (+x) and setting a shortcut to it. Since it one file, you can delete the old ones easily, so management is very simple from a (this) users point of view.

[Vistaus]

Yeah, but with the tarball you don't automatically get the desktop integration and a properly updated and placed .desktop file (and who knows what else).

You can easily add a desktop file yourself using MenuLibre or KDE's Menu Editor.

I'm using a tarball version of Firefox and some things became much slower: e.g. after I moved to the .tar.gz version changing the theme in youtube is sluggish while the packaged version used to do that instantly,

That's a bug in FF 104 that's fixed in 104.1.

editing comments freezes for a second or two.

I have no issues with that.