I’ve gathered that a lot of people in the nix space seem to dislike snaps but otherwise like Flatpaks, what seems to be the difference here?

Are Snaps just a lot slower than flatpaks or something? They’re both a bit bloaty as far as I know but makes Canonicals attempt worse?

Personally I think for home users or niche there should be a snap less variant of this distribution with all the bells and whistles.

Sure it might be pointless, but you could argue that for dozens of other distros that take Debian, Fedora or Arch stuff and make it as their own variant, I.e MX Linux or Manjaro.

What are your thoughts?

  • @refalo
    75•25 days ago

    The server is proprietary and last I checked you can’t even turn off auto-updating or verify the binaries they push to you.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-mint-dumps-ubuntu-snap/

    In the Ubuntu 20.04 package base, the Chromium package is indeed empty and acting, without your consent, as a backdoor by connecting your computer to the Ubuntu Store. Applications in this store cannot be patched, or pinned. You can’t audit them, hold them, modify them, or even point Snap to a different store. You’ve as much empowerment with this as if you were using proprietary software, i.e. none. This is in effect similar to a commercial proprietary solution, but with two major differences: It runs as root, and it installs itself without asking you.

    • @[email protected]
      7•25 days ago

      This is why I don’t love snaps, proprietary backend. I think snaps actually work great for the most part, and flatpaks don’t support cli apps, only GUI.

      • ZephrC
        25•25 days ago

        I don’t know why people keep saying that flatpaks don’t support cli apps. They do. I know it’s awkward to type out flatpak run io.github.zyedidia.micro or whatever every time you want to use a text editor, but aliases fix that pretty neatly, and that example wasn’t hypothetical.

        • @[email protected]
          13•25 days ago

          You don’t even need to create aliases yourself. Flatpak creates wrapper scripts for every app that you install. Just symlink them into your PATH.

          ln -s /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin/org.example.CliTool ~/.local/bin/cli-tool

          or if you are using a user remote

          ln -s ~/.local/share/flatpak/exports/bin/org.example.CliTool ~/.local/bin/cli-tool

          (Note: some lemmy clients render the the tilde in code blocks incorrectly)

          • @[email protected]
            3•25 days ago

            This is news to me! I’m honestly just paroting others with the no CLI support, I never did the homework. Shame on me I guess!

      • Butt Pirate
        1•22 days ago

        I use flatpak vim. Works fine as long as you don’t need to edit system files.