Tldr: the new store only supports snaps, deb support will come later. OP, please provide summary next time if you link to clickbait articles.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Ok, note taken 👍
Or this time as both title and summary can be edited.
Deb support will come later, but:
If the same piece of software exists in the Ubuntu repository and the snap store the new store will only make it possible to install the snap version.
So the title is on point IMO.
It's not a click bait per se. Even after deb support they will use only snap for applications that has a snap package and only debs if it hasn't got any snap package afaik.
BUT, the "new" store is based on a community project which ALREADY supports both deb and snap.
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I never found out what's wrong with APT.
APT is best
Aren't you sorta trusting whoever wrote any package you install with root? I mean, you should have that attitude anyhow as packages have a huge attack surface so privilege escalation bugs are way more common than remote execution but still, flatpak and snap at least offer a bit of a sandbox which might improve...
Depends on your distro and what's available in the repo. With default repos you're more trusting the distro developer to vet packages.
I trust debian for that. It's been a while since I used Ubuntu so I don't remember how their repos are set up but the debian team is notoriously conservative with their repos.
The track record has been very good as far as i know with thousands of packages over the years so I doubt if there is a real problem to be solved here.
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Classic canonical move: Take community software, force snaps into it and then ship it.
Yep, I can not understand why Canonical keep pushing snaps on desktop
Because maintaining snaps is a lot less work for whoever maintains the package, upstream developers, volunteers, or Canonical. If I'm shipping software for Ubuntu and I can use snap, I sure as hell will use it instead of deb.
Flatpaks are so much better than snaps. There's nothing that Snaps can do that Flatpaks can't do better, aside from CLI tools. But CLI tools should just be in Docker anyways.
Flatpak is mainly for packaging desktop apps, whilst snap can update the entire distro (kernel, mesa, system apps, cli). Snap does things Fedora needs rpm-ostree for.
In my opinion docker isn't as useful for cli tools. I need easy access to many little tools, and this results in me having one container with everything. But that doesn't work well with network capture etc. In the end being able to install packages system wide quickly is really useful.
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do they get funding from hardware vendors? snaps use a lot more resources
because they won't need to maintain it, they won't even need to maintain the dependencies, some guy online will maintain the package and it's dependency for them, whether it's updated or not, it's going to launch, that's the whole point of those style of packaging
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'Classic canonical corporate move'...there I fixed it for you.
Maybe I need to reconsider Pop OS. Last time I tried they shipped with a broken kernel, but that's probably fixed now.
Ubuntu is getting on my last nerve. At this point I'm going Debian on everything except Thinkpad, but only because it's Nvidia based and Pop!_OS just works on it.
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Yeah, nah, that's a dealbreaker for me. I'm back to LMDE when this happens.
I don't mind having snaps available but I'd avoid using them whenever possible. They're larger than necessary, slower than necessary, and I trust software checked by its original devs plus distro maintainers more than software checked by the devs alone.
Honestly not sure why it matters, provided the store is full. Both are similar to end users
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This is why im on the hunt for a new distro. Looking at pop and fedora right now. Kinda prefer deb cause thats been my env for 15 yrs
Debian is right there then.
Can I get debian with latest kde? Like stable debian but rolling DE like kde neon?
Debian 12 shipped with the latest kde plasma version, but the distro is designed to be stable, with a capital S. The packages will not update until the version does.
Flatpaks are a great way to get modern software on a stable OS like debian. If neon has a flatpak version, it would be a good answer.
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You could check backports.
I don't usually need the absolute latest so I'm fine waiting for stuff to reach testing.
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Been using popos on all my computers for the past year and have been happy with it.
I’d suggest if you want stock and recent Gnome, stick with Fedora.
Pop is building their own DE that they will switch to sometime in 2023. Which also mean they will remain 22.04 till then.
I’m waiting for VanillaOS 2.0 release to see if it is any better.
I’ve heard the latest Debian absolutely slaps; haven’t tried it yet myself though
consider: LMDE
Not only that, LMDE 6 based on Debian 12 shouldn’t be too far off, which should be a substantial upgrade to the base system.
Linux Mint 21.2 is in beta, they previously said LMDE 6 should be about a month after the 21.2 release.
@skillissuer @code Do more than consider! - It's perfect.
Maybe not cutting edge, exciting or novelty-filled but dependable, and rock solid.
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Why do Linux nerds that care about this sort of stuff hate snaps so much?
Is it the concept of snaps / flatpaks that is the issue or snaps specifically because Canonical is behind them?
I know literally nothing about how they work except I installed the VLC snap and it's fine.
I couldn't install Parsec (a remote desktop game streaming app) because of a missing dependency (an old version of lib-something codec that wasn't in my newer version of Ubuntu). I spent like an hour trying to figure out how to take the 18.04 version and add it to 22.10. I don't know Linux at all so I wasn't making much progress. Someone, not the developers of Parsec, made a flatpak and it magically worked.
I was afraid that because the flatpak was made by some random guy I couldn't really trust it. I looked inside the flatpak and it's seems to be nothing except for the Parsec deb coming straight from the official Parsec URL and that libcodec thing that was causing a problem.
So from my perspective, not knowing the technical details or politics, what's the problem?
- They kinda suck. They take a long time to launch
- They are in practice proprietary to Ubuntu so they are not really FOSS
- The draw of Ubuntu it is was based on Debian Testing and therefor pretty stable.
- It's Yet Another Containerization stack. We already have flatpack, app image, chroot jails and more.
Why would a serious user want a psuedo proprietary Nth app containerization platform that sidesteps a serious incubation chain and has poor performance?
The snap store is proprietary, flatpaks handle the graphical app space better, OCI containers handle the service space better, and really high reported load times.
Flatpaks are awesome IMHO.
I've been using more and more flatpaks lately on arch and fedora based distros, i have no idea how snaps compare but seems similar? Seems an odd push from Ubuntu, but could make more sense than deb packages for non techy users perhaps?
Ubuntu / Canonical were working on Snap for some years when Flatpak came on the scene. They've been shipping Ubuntu bits using it since 2016. In addition to the legacy, Snap is more versatile than Flatpak in that it can be used to package pretty much anything, including system bits. It's also had a secure sandbox from the start. Changing to Flatpak would be a functionality downgrade for Canonical and Ununtu maintainers using Snap. In addition Flatpak can be used along with Snap on Ubuntu so there's no need to not use both for whoever finds that useful. Snap lets Ubuntu ship software using less work, which means more up-to-date bits in Ubuntu. Users can install other software via Snap or Flatpak, whichever they find more useful.
A big issue for me with snap is, that the server side software is proprietary. So it really really does feel like they are trying for lock-in
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Snap is very similar just not portable to most other distros. It makes a lot of sense both for users and for vendor lock-in.
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