this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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Yeah they’re all in on snaps. Vote with your distro choice.
So, as someone that's been on flavors of Ubuntu/Linux Mint for me personal computer since Breezy Badger, any good distro recommendations? I've been using Ubuntu Mate and upgrading in place for the last ~5 years, so I've mostly avoided Snaps, but I'm looking to upgrade my computer and I'm probably going to need a fresh install. I'd like to stay on the Ubuntu/Debian tree, but I've been using RHEL on my work computer for a while now, so I'm not totally unfamiliar with that distro branch.
Also, should I be as concerned about Flatpaks as everyone seems to be concerned about Snaps?
Check out VanillaOS. I think it's pretty neat. Their webpage doesn't really get into the benefits as much as I think they should, but a very quick summary is that it leverages distrobox and some custom package manager to allow you to seamlessly install and run packages from other distros. It's also kind of an immutable OS (but not really). It lets you pick which types of apps you want during the install (snaps, fltapak, AppImage, etc)
I am not super in the loop about why people are so against snaps, but I don't like the centralized nature of them, and if that's also the general concern, then flatpak should be fine, since it's decentralized.
I saw a couple youtube videos about VanillaOS; I could certainly find you one of them if you want to know more.
Why do you say it's "not really" immutable? It is immutable with an A/B partitioning system using ABRoot.
You can disable it to install stuff if you want.
That was true with Almost, but they've now switched to ABRoot, which uses overlays instead. https://documentation.vanillaos.org/docs/ABRoot/
rpm-ostree does this longgg way before
True, but how is that relevant? ABRoot has its own benefits and drawbacks over OSTree.