4mo ago

Snap bad

80 comments

I think most snap haters mostly hate, that Canonical forces snap upon them, an wouldn't hate so much about it if they had the choice.
- Yeah, who'd hate using a package manager that increasingly slows down your boot time with every package installed, or that uses a closed source store to provide you FOSS
  Maybe there's a reason canonical has to force it on their users
- I also hate that it creates a loopback device for every installed snap
  
  There's a lot I dislike about snap. This is the thing I hate.
- Yeah typing "apt install firefox" and getting the Snap version does loudly and obnoxiously disqualify Ubuntu from any devices owned by me or my family.
- Thanks to snap I switched to arch. It gave a linux beginner so much drive to learn the terminal and install a harder os lol. The firefox snap was the worst shit.
- Isn't that kinda the same with, for example, Fedora and Flatpaks? Or Debian and debs? Or Ubuntu and debs? Or Fedora and rpms?
  The packaging system that your distro provides gets you the packages you get. For a small number of packages that were a maintenance nightmare, Ubuntu provides a transitional debs to move people over to the snaps (e.g. Firefox, Thunderbird), but if you want to get it from another repo, you can do exactly what KDE Neon does by setting your preferences.
  
  No, Debian doesn't take your apt install ... command and install a snap behind your back...
  
  the thing people dislike about that is that you're silently moved from an open system to a closed-source one.
  Debian's .deb hosting is completely open and you can host your own repository from which anyone can pull packages just by adding it to the apt config. fedora, suse, arch, same thing.
  only Canonical can host snaps, and they're not telling people how the hosting works. KDE seems to upload their packages to the snap store for Neon, judging from their page.
  also, crucially, canonical are not the ones doing the maintenance for those apt packages. the debian team does that.
  
  Fedora with Flatpaks is open and up front about whether you're getting a Flatpak or a system installed package, and lets you choose if both are available. And installing through dnf/yum isn't going to do anything at all with Flatpak.
  And what about Debian with debs? That's literally what apt was designed to work with. If it gave you Flatpaks, or the flatpak command installed debs, that would be more like what Ubuntu is doing.
  The fact that Canonical shoehorned snaps into apt is the problem. I've heard bad things about snap, but I wouldn't know because I've never used it, and I never will because of this.
  When I tell my computer to do one thing and it does something completely different without my consent, that is a problem, and is why I left Windows. I don't need that in Linux too, and Canonical has proven they can't be trusted not to do that.
  
  There are big differences between Snaps and Flatpaks.
  both the flatpak server and the client are open source
  flatpak does not publish 3rd party apps, promoting them as verified (https://news.itsfoss.com/valve-steam-snap-ubuntu/)

I never used snap, always use official repo > multilib > extra > chaotic aur > aur > flatpak > FUCK IT, I BUILD FROM SOURCE CODE FROM SHADY GITHUB REPO
- FUCK IT, I BUILD FROM SOURCE CODE FROM SHADY GITHUB REPO_*
  I feel seen.
- curl shit | sudo bash is just so convenient.
  
  I hope you mean https://shit.
  
  The safest install method \s

Thread made by canonical employee
- Lol imagine a canonical employee using nixos

Now also throw GNU Guix, Homebrew and some AppImages in there

It's a shame that snaps are forced to use Canonicals closed source backend because they are really good, and a fully snap system is a very compelling idea for immutable systems
- They're not forced to do so. You can install snaps locally (or provide a distribution system that treats snapd much the way apt treats dpkg), or you can point snapd at a different store. The snap store API is open and documented, and for a while there was even a separate snap store project. It seems to have died out because despite people's contention about Canonical's snap store, they didn't actually actually want to run their own snap stores.
  
  I don't know why you're getting downvoted. It makes perfect sense that Cannonical made it's own proprietary package ecosystem and while technically anyone can build their own snap store, ain't nobody got time for that.

People using Linux should take their heads out of their asses sometimes and just let people enjoy things they way they prefer.
- Fuckin preach it friend!
  That's the joy of Linux, the "have it your way" approach to an OS
  
  yeah well, you can't have it your way on Ubuntu when Canonical FORCES you to use snaps (heck they even hacked apt to prefer snaps instead of debs)
- Heck yeah! There's so much gatekeeping and tribalism that it kinda sucks out the joy a little bit

Snap is bad. I only say this as someone who did a lot of OS security work for Linux and Unix, so take that with a grain of salt.
- Would you mind explaining why? I'm genuinely curious

I use nix like the AUR for debian.

I have NODE installed using snap lmao. Why? Installing it the normal way just gives me tons of errors that I'm too bored to deal with. I'm sure there's a fix, but I'm too lazy to debug all that. Of course, I don't use snap node for hosting servers and stuff. I just use it for react native. Regardless, it works n I'm happy lol
- Yeah. I don't mind snap at all for cases where a better package doesn't exist.
  What made me give up Ubuntu was how it railroaded me into snap versions of packages that work better, for me, as native .deb installs.
  
  Oh definitely. Canonical forcing us to use snap Firefox was very shitty. I mean I still use Ubuntu because I'm lazy, but I did change the snap Firefox thing to the apt libraries or whatever.
  I really don't understand why they don't just adopt flatpak.

snap bad indeed

80 comments