• Patch@feddit.ukOP
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    57
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    I know this thread is likely to quickly descend into 50 variants of “ew, snap”, but it’s a good write up of what is really a pretty interesting novel approach to the immutable desktop world.

    As the article says, it could well be the thing that actually justifies Canonical’s dogged perseverance with snaps in the first place.

    • V ‎ ‎ @beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      20
      ·
      1 year ago

      I appreciate that they try, and as much as I dislike some of snap’s design choices I think it has a place. Flatpak appears to be the winner in this race however, and I feel like this is Unity all over. Just as the project gets good they abandon it for the prevailing winds. I’ve been told the snap server isn’t open source, which is a big concern?

      • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        10
        ·
        1 year ago

        Unlike desktop environments where there were equivalent alternatives to Unity, Flatpak isn’t an alternative to Snap that can deliver an equivalent solution. You can’t build an OS on top of Flatpak. This is why I think that if Snap makes the lives of Canonical developers easier, they’ll keep maintaining it. We’ll know if Ubuntu Core Desktop becomes a mainstream flavor or the default one. I think there is a commercial value of it in the enterprise world where tight control of the OS and upgrade robustness are needed. In this kind of a future Snap will have a long and productive life. If it ends up being used only for desktop apps which Flatpak covers, it may fall by the wayside as you suggested.

        • V ‎ ‎ @beehaw.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          1 year ago

          Absolutely, and I think that’s why snap has a future at all. Immutability is the future, as well as self-contained apps. We saw the explosive growth of Docker as indication that this was the way. If they can make their tooling as easy as a Dockerfile they will win just by reducing the work needed to support it.

    • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 year ago

      I’m pretty excited about it. It’s a much cleaner solution to the problem immutable OSes are trying to solve. Dare I say it’s better even than the Android model because it covers the whole stack with a single system.

    • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      I don’t like Canonical pushing snaps as universal apps for all distros, because of issues like sandboxing not working on mainline kernels.

      But it’s pretty interesting to see how a fully snap based desktop OS could look like. It might have less limitations than rpm-ostree. Easy access to recent mesa and similar would be awesome.

    • KISSmyOS@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      12
      arrow-down
      11
      ·
      1 year ago

      I actually don’t understand the issue people have with Snaps. The main gripe seems to be “It’s controlled by Canonical”.
      But why is it an issue that Canonical controls a source of software for their own OS? Isn’t that the same with every distro’s repository?

      • woelkchen@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        75
        arrow-down
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        But why is it an issue that Canonical controls a source of software for their own OS? Isn’t that the same with every distro’s repository?

        No. You can add any other repository to apt, rpm, Flatpak, etc. You cannot do the same with Snap and that’s by design. Canonical wants to be the sole gatekeeper of Linux software, hoping that all developers have no alternative but to publish software on the Snap store (ideally only there) which works best on Ubuntu.

        Therefore: Fuck Snap.

        • makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          25
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Exactly. I feel they want to sell it to a big player, but no big player will touch it unless they can fully control it. Hence snap as part of that plan. Ubuntu is a hell no for me.

          • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            15
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            Forget selling it.
            I think they’re going to get everyone trapped in the ecosystem, and then they’ll start charging for access to the source.

            • KISSmyOS@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              5
              arrow-down
              3
              ·
              1 year ago

              How would they trap everyone in the ecosystem?
              This isn’t Apple, there’s a gajillon other ways of getting software you can use on every single linux distro.

                  • woelkchen@lemmy.world
                    link
                    fedilink
                    arrow-up
                    2
                    arrow-down
                    1
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    Then I guess it’s a good thing they don’t control all other Linux distros.

                    But they would to a degree if the Snap Store would actually succeed becoming the Linux app store (like Steam is for games but that’s more because all other vendors don’t care to make a Linux client).

        • KISSmyOS@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          arrow-down
          6
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          You cannot do the same with Snap and that’s by design. Canonical wants to be the sole gatekeeper of Linux software

          Then why did they publish source code and documentation for all parts of it, so you can create your own snap store?

            • Patch@feddit.ukOP
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              4
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              You can; the issue is that you can’t add two snap repositories at once.

              This is functionally pretty much the same thing, as nobody is likely to want to use snap while locking themselves out of the main snap repository, but it’s still important to make the distinction.

              In theory I guess there’s nothing stopping you setting up a mirror of the main snap repo with automatic package scraping, but nobody’s really bothered exploring it seeing as no distro other than Ubuntu has taken any interest in running snap.

              • woelkchen@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                I know that it’s possible to change the one entry but adding additional ones is not possible and that’s by design.

                  • Patch@feddit.ukOP
                    link
                    fedilink
                    arrow-up
                    1
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    It’s all open source so there’s no reason you couldn’t fork it and add that functionality. Although it’d probably be a fairly involved piece of work; it wouldn’t be a simple one-line change.

          • flashgnash@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            1 year ago

            From reading this that’s not the whole story. Someone working at canonical successfully made a version of snap that could use alternative stores, but the default version does not allow it

            And honestly at the point of installing that modified version you may as well just install a different package manager anyway

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      9
      arrow-down
      11
      ·
      1 year ago

      Snap makes a lot of sense for desktop apps in my opinion. There’s a conceptual difference between system level packages that you install using something like APT, and applications. Applications should be managed at the user layer while the base system should provide all the common libraries and APIs.

      It’s also worth noting that this is a similar approach to what MacOS has been doing for ages with .app bundles where any shared libraries and assets are packaged together in the app folder. The approach addresses a lot of the issues you see with shared libraries such as having two different apps that want different versions of a particular library.

      The trade off is that you end up using a bit more disk space and memory, but it’s so negligible that the benefits of having apps being self-contained far outweigh these downsides.

      • ShiningWing@lemmygrad.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        The problem here is that for that purpose, Flatpak is better in nearly every way and is far more universal

        I think Snap makes the most sense for something like Ubuntu Core, where it has the unique benefit of being able to provide lower level system components (as opposed to Flatpak which is more or less just for desktop GUI apps), but it doesn’t make sense for much else over other existing solutions