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Why is there only one Snap Store?

merlijn.sebrechts.be

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Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#101

Post by gjsman-1000 »

ppseafield wrote: post #66
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat: Hires Alex to work on Flatpak. Loved by Community, almost a dozen distros supporting Flatpak as a next-gen package format by default. Snap: Loved only by Canonical devotees. Zero distros supporting Snap exclusively by default. Red Hat: SystemD Canonical: Upstart, dead to SystemD. Red Hat & Others: Wayland Canonical: Mir. Dead to Wayland. Red Hat & Others: GNOME 3 Canonical: Unity1-7. Dead to GNOME.

Upstart existed before systemd. I used to think it was NIH syndrome, but its initial release was in 2006, whereas systemd's was in 2010.

It's not just a release date issue. It matters (to me, at least) that Canonical was doing it's thing, RH invents something shortly after that trounces Canonical, Canonical makes futile attempts to save the ship before finally dumping the project.

For example, Upstart. RH invents SystemD, Canonical stays with Upstart until, like, 2017 before giving up.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#102

Post by gjsman-1000 »

AgentME wrote: post #98
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you are building an IoT Device, lots of stuff for reliability. Automatic rollbacks, self-repairing, immutable FS... For a desktop user, honestly, very little.

That reliability stuff sounds good on desktop too. I don't exactly enjoy re-running apt after it has mysterious failures halfway through installs.

You might find Fedora Silverblue fascinating. It's an OS that uses Flatpak for Desktop Apps exclusively, which disposable "toolboxes" for non-Flatpak apps.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#103

Post by pantalaimon »

simion314 wrote: post #95
solarkraft wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter who you are, having to maintain a patched version of Snap just to use your own software is absolutely ridiculous. I knew things were bad around Snap, but I didn't think they were attacking their feet with such fire power.

You do not need that, you can just use a flag snap install --dangerous /path/to/snap

But then you won’t get updates for that Snap

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#104

Post by 8K832d7tNmiQ »

freedomben wrote: post #35
geofft wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LXC/LXD folks at Canonical are doing great work with adding kernel features for namespaces etc. I think the "problem" is that Canonical has figured out - correctly - that all their worthwhile stuff needs to be done upstream of Ubuntu. Even their packagers know to try to get things in Debian first and to reduce diffs when they can. Unfortunately, that means that the unique Ubuntu secret sauce is all the weird stuf…

I got so excited about LXD ... until I found out it requires snap. My first "cup of ubuntu" was well over 10 years ago now and I've always wanted to see it succeed. It's repeated squandering of so much potential. Edit: I was referring to LXD usage on Ubuntu-20.04 and versions going forward (I should have made that clear in the post). Sure, snap isn't technically required since you can "change distros" or "compile it…

What do you mean by requiring snap to install LXD?

even Arch Linux listed it in their default repo.[0]

[0]:https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/lxd/

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#105

Post by spanhandler »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #91
spanhandler wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Rarely breaks. Worst I've seen is needing a permissions tweak after an OS upgrade, in many years of use. Back when I switched from Macports I switched because ordinary usage kept rendering Macports so goddamn broken that it was easier to nuke its directory and start over rather than figure out how to fix whatever my bold command of "install package" had destroyed this time. I've never seen normal or even slightly…

Homebrew is solid, and I think you make a good list. I had it break before with weird cyclical linking issues, but mostly it works good enough. What I was more curious about is what specifically sets it apart from a solid Linux package manager? > Lets you manage your packages with ordinary user-level permissions. No root elevation required. This is the one major difference I'd say is not currently common on Linux. Co…

> This is the one major difference I'd say is not currently common on Linux. Could be easily solved by keeping package list databases in $HOME - the only reason root is required nowdays is because these are usually kept as 1 copy per system.

As I posted elsewhere, I think it'd actually be very hard to replicate the experience of Homebrew on macOS, on Linux, specifically for GUI programs, because not only is the the Linux GUI (and related multimedia capabilities, for that matter) so much more fragmented than macOS (where all that ships as one big, stable package) but that fragmentation bleeds through to and manifests in one's experience with individual applications. If not for that, yeah, it'd be very achievable.

Its package selection is also a whole lot bigger than most Linux package managers, in my experience. I don't think I've seen a selection nearly this wide since I was a Gentoo user, many moons ago.

The CLI is better than most Linux package managers—some of those are improving, though. Good error messages and "did you mean..." go a long way.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#106

Post by jamieweb »

My main reason for disliking Snap is the fact that it allows anybody in the world to publish a package with minimal moderation. This completely undermines the inherent trust that system package managers should have.

When installing critical system packages, I want to be absolutely certain that these are legitimate/official, and that even if I make a minor error in typing a command, I won't inadvertently install some sort of typosquatted fake version of the package.

When using Apt with the default repositories, this isn't a problem at all, as only known, trusted packages are available. In other words, there's no chance of someone publishing a fierfox or apahce2 package to try to typosquat someone.

I don't even want to talk about the forced automatic updates either... these make it essentially impossible to have a stable/reliable system for specialist use cases, e.g. browser testing, bastion host, build environment, where control over updates is very important.

On the sandboxing - it's good in principle, but rarely seems to be implemented in a truly meaningful way, as ultimately once you have home drive access, you don't even need to worry about escalating privileges as everything valuable is probably in your home area! There's an xkcd about this somewhere...

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#107

Post by turboman »

ewzimm wrote: post #59
war1025 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - making bad decisions so people jump off Ubuntu and go back to Debian, my beloved distro Amen. Debian is the best.

When I fist started using Debian, it was a bit of a potato. It improved over time but still felt a little wooden. Ubuntu brought a lot of people back into the Debian ecosystem, ensured that it improved constantly to the point where it's a corporate power buster, and I feel like the next release will hit the bullseye for sure.

That's a bit of a stretch.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#108

Post by simion314 »

pantalaimon wrote: post #103
simion314 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do not need that, you can just use a flag snap install --dangerous /path/to/snap

But then you won’t get updates for that Snap

So you want something like a PPA? Is flatpack promoting each app will have it's own repo(Skype.Dropbox,Slack,Discord?)

Seems to me that you want a way to have applications and updates installed by people and bypass the review process? If you are a distro maintainer you can change the hardcoded values before you build(distros always change this stuff) but if you are not a distro then you should either submit the app for review or do what other apps do and prompt a notification that a new update is available with a link to a download page.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#109

Post by spanhandler »

PaulBGD_ wrote: post #94
spanhandler wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

• Nothing available that's as lightweight and good as Apple's "office"-type suite. • Nothing as all-around good as Preview (yes, seriously). • Worse battery life, partly due to worse OS optimizations and partly due to not having Safari available. Solutions to this in Linux that actually yield good results usually involve hard-capping performance at a pretty low level, IME. • Little things like screen recording and sc…

I'm not understanding the English keyboard complaint, am I missing something?

Look up how you type: those • characters I used in my post, an m-dash (—), a c-cedilla (ç), a german double-S (ß), basic accented characters for various Western European languages (we have many, many loan words and phrases from those in English—façade, résumé, áñ∂ §ò öñ), punctuation for French and Spanish (no, you don't strictly need these for English—but in practice, depending on the register you're writing in, actually you do), major world currency symbols ($, £, €, ¥, ¢), basic mathematical symbols and mathy Greek letters (≤, ∑) and so on.

Look up how you do that on US English keyboard layouts in macOS, Linux, or Windows. Then check AltGr and US International alternative layouts for the latter two. Marvel at how macOS manages to crush all those options in usability with their default, without affecting the experience for someone who doesn't need those at all. Join me in wondering how no-one else has at least matched them on this, which is not some recently-added feature in macOS, but is practically ancient in computing terms.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#110

Post by commoner »

donor20 wrote: post #100
1_person wrote: post #67

That reminds me of the stake Ubuntu Core was born with in its heart: > An Ubuntu SSO account is required to create the first user on an Ubuntu Core installation. They just keep flinging shit at nothing and hoping to hit a wall they can build a gate in. They're trying to boil the frog slowly with Snap on the Server/Desktop branches. There is no possible genuine motive for these maneuverings to be in the position of ga…

Wow - strong language. Can I ask - do you contribute meaningfully to any open source packages? Do you buy software at a significant commercial level? I've noticed this sort of total absolutest, outraged, scorched earth style sometimes comes from the free riders. At least in some businesses I've worked with - if you can eliminate customers that approach things in this way your staff are happier, your life more relaxed…

You're making plenty of unfounded assumptions about the parent poster's personal character.

One is not obligated to contribute to open source packages or pay for high-price contracts to provide feedback on a company's software on a public forum. (And the server portion of Snap is closed source.)

Just because Microsoft and Google do worse does not mean that Canonical cannot do better.

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