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?

  • IrdialEnglish
    -1•2 months ago

    I read a comment on Reddit a while back that pointed out how much of the open source community has no issue hosting projects on GitHub while also lampooning Snap for having a closed-source backend server. However, since Snap (and GitHub) are open source themselves, nothing is stopping curious and concerned users from auditing the codebase or hosting their own servers. I removed Snap from my Ubuntu installation and use Flatpak instead, but I do not hate Snap. And for what it’s worth, I always go for the native DEB when possible…

      • Snot FlickermanEnglish
        15•2 months ago

        I really think people get confused between Git, the open source application, and Github the non-open-source online code repository.

        Part of the reason they probably think they are one and the same is how often Git is used in command line to clone a Github repository locally.

        Gitlab is open source and self-hostable, to my knowledge.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•2 months ago

        That was the point they were making. GitHub is to git as the snap store is to snap, albeit there are existing alternatives to GitHub.

        • @moonpiedumplings
          6•2 months ago

          The comparison isn’t quite right because you can use git with any provider (Github, gitlab, etc), including multiple at once.

          On the other hand, snap is hardcoded to only be able to use one store at a time, the snap store. To modify this behaviour, you would have to make changes to the snap client source code.

          It’s a crucial difference.