this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
412 points (98.1% liked)
Linux
48130 readers
431 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Hot take: PPAs suck and snaps/flatpaks are better.
With PPAs, inevitably some repo that hasn’t been updated since 2015 causes dependency conflicts and you have to sit there and troubleshoot, or pick between the software you need and actually having an OS that’s not EOL. With snaps, you can keep your decade old dependencies all bundled up and still upgrade your system even if the package maintainer has abandoned it.
The issue people have with snaps isn't the containerization or the bundles, but the proprietary backend. There is no way to point the snaps at a different store other than the one canonical controls. Canonicals forcing snaps on people pisses a lot of people off because it's a blatant power grab, an attempt to get people dependent on something they have control over in a microsoft-esque move. Flatpaks and docker don't have that issue.
Hot take: it doesn't feel nice to have a change forced.
It should be the personal preference of the user to decide whether to use native or snap/flatpak. If native package manager decide to not support the package any longer it would be better to make user aware and stop maintaining app, than to install a snap package. This is a user's decision.
Also this can have far reaching consequences. Imagine you cannot use/install snaps on your machine due some reason, what now?
I tried so hard to embrace snaps and flatpak. I really did. But the snap service kept bogging down. Installs specifically of Firefox were ponderously slow to start up. And ultimately I ended up with regular installs, PPAs, snaps, and flatpaks all together with their own daemons, update paths, and quirks sucking up my system bandwidth and emotional resources. System was constantly slow. Felt like I was running Windows.
I flipped over to endeavours, really enjoying it. Feels like Ubuntu did in the earlier years. Great support community, lots of choice, but a straightforward path to just using your system if that's what you're there for. And the same computer runs a good 25% faster.
PPAs suck, no doubt. But the thing is, if snap is so superior, just switch your whole distribution over to it and be done with it. Don't do this underhanded switcheroo with individual packages spread over so many years.
The crux here is ultimately that snap just doesn't look to be up to the task of replacing
.deb, otherwise they'd have already done it. But they still want their proprietary appstore, so they have to make snap relevant by force.Yes, that is the acceptable use case. Aging, I maintained software in a usable form. Not “we’re showing off our container engine so everyone has to use it now”.
Agreed. I'd rather install manually than use a third-party PPA. I've had way too many problems, especially when it comes time for an OS upgrade.
I see this as a false dichotomy. The point of a distro is to have a wide array of stuff tested and available in official repositories. If the official repositories only contain half-assed snap ports, what's the point? I either suffer with a shitty Firefox or jump through more hoops than ever before to install it from external sources? Ugh.
I'm on Ubuntu again, and I've had it up to my eyeballs with snaps. When the time comes to upgrade again, I'm either going back upstream to Debian, or downstream to a de-snapped Ubuntu derivative.