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@programming.dev
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    5 months 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.

    • the_weez@midwest.social
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      5 months 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.

  • Presi300@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    The problem with snap isn’t that it’s useless, it’s that it’s garbage. Snaps are just plain worse in every way, compared to other packaging formats. They impact boot time A LOT… like A LOT A LOT on a hard drive, use a ton of space, are slow to launch unless you use like tricks or what not to speed up consequent launches after the 1st one, the store backend is proprietary and poorly moderated, the store is slow and unresponsive, and cannonnical is pulling some real micro$oft-esk shit to try and force them on users… Stuff like aliasing apt commands to snap, disallowing ubuntu spins to ship flatpak by default, etc…

    The only redeeming quality that snaps have is that you can run CLI/server programs as a snap, and even then, just use docker lmao.

  • youmaynotknow@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    As you can probably tell by all the lovely comments about Snaps, that’s the reason. Snaps is crap, by design.

  • lemmyreader@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

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

    There is : Linux Mint

  • wiki_me@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    Calling it hate is an exaggeration , people are entitled to their opinion and informing other people by criticizing snap.

    Another advantage not mentioned is that snap is a product of canonical (a for profit company talking about an IPO for years), flathub is managed by the gnome foundation (a US registered non profit, which should provide some legal protection).

  • Wispy2891@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I especially hate how it ruins the df -h command. Install a dozen snaps and it becomes unreadable

  • MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    In addition to what’s already been said, Canonical have a history of starting grandiose projects and then abandoning them a few years later. See Mir, Unity, and Ubuntu Touch for examples.

  • bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I’m personally not a fan of any universal packaging solution. I’ve tried flatpaks, appimages, and snaps, and ran into weird, annoying issued that I just never have when I install via package manager, build from source or even just run a portable build of an app.

    I see the appeal of a universal package, but imo a bigger emphasis on portable native builds would solve a lot of the issues these packaging solutions are aiming for, while not introducing many of the downsides

  • THCDenton@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Its been a while but the last time I was running ubuntu I ran into an infuriating issue related to snaps. To be fair I can’t remember the exact details and it was related to some web dev stuff. All I remember is that I quit Ubuntu for a while fighting with snaps for a day or two.