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?
Research what happened to Upstart, Mir or Unity. It won’t take long until snap becomes one of them. Somebody at canonical seems to desperately obsess over having something unique, either as a way to justify canonicals existance or even in the hopes of making the next big thing. Over all these years they never learned that whatever they do exclusively will always fall short of any other joint efforts in the linux world, because they always lack the technical advances, ability/will to push it for a prolonged time and/or the non-proprietary-ness. So instead of collaborating like every serious linux vendor, they’re polluting their distro with half-assed, ever changing and unwanted experiments. They’re even hijacking apt commands to push their stupid snap stuff against the users intent. With the shengians they’re pulling Ubuntu cannot be relied on, and with that they’re sabotaging their own success and drive away any commercial customers that generate revenue.
Snaps are proprietary, flatpacks are not, is the long and short of it
They are not. But the store is proprietary and snapd doesnt allow other stores. You could patch snapd to allow other stores though and the format is open
Snaps are just as “open source” as “Office Open XML” (.docx, .pptx etc.) are open file formats.
If there isn’t a fully open source software stack, it isn’t really open source.
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.
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.
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.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)