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Why is there only one Snap Store?

merlijn.sebrechts.be

341–350 of 362 posts

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate you proving my point. High end desktops are not viable on Linux, which is a shame, because I really wanted it to work.

Dual GPU is a much smaller niche than "high end desktops".

Multiple gpus are even supported just not outputs hooked up to both GPUs as a single X screen.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA/Tips_and_tricks#...

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are of course correct. I'm sorry about my outburst. I've had too many experiences with "Haha linux on desktop bad nerd haha" people, and let it get to me. I apologize.

Not sure if the replier was only specifically talking to you. I don’t like Linux [on the desktop]. Most responses in geekier online communities do seem to be smug and/or assume you don’t know things. That was happening in this thread too outside of you. For reference, I too have spent a decent amount of time with Lubuntu. I doubt I’ll switch from Mac for foreseeable future.

> Not sure if the replier was only specifically talking to you.

> That was happening in this thread too outside of you.

I was guilty of it as well though, and would rather accept responsibility and change than carry on perpetuating the current state of affairs.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the ones based on Ubuntu are removing it. On the rest, available doesn't mean anything, it is a low quality packaging. On any distro that doesn't run apparmor, the snap sandbox doesn't work, for example. That's not something you would use outside of experiments.

Linux Mint put in an apt rule to avoid it installing as a dependency of other apps. This decision was triggered by Canonical's announcement to stop maintaining the Chromium deb package. Linux Mint was pissed they had to either switch to the Debian version or to the Snap, so they made some fuss. I know of at least three Ubuntu derivatives who have Snap preinstalled and every snap I maintain has between 5% and 10% non-…

> Canonical's announcement to stop maintaining the Chromium deb package

Funny twist. They hijacked it to install snap.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you want Canonical to just adopt whatever the new hot RH stuff as soon as it's stable?

You do want to know the alternative is stable and better for a few years before even thinking to make the change.

It's easy to laugh at the history after it took place.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#345
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.

While most of my systems are on Debian, the installation experience could really use some work, especially the partitioning part. I've had several occasions when I had to resort to fully manually partitioning my drives because of some hickup. Even in Debian 10, swap is enabled by default in the installer (maybe depending on system RAM) and the encryption guide will refuse to proceed in that case. Only way out of that…

Rather than "I love Debian", I think its core strength making the preferred choice for most situations:

* well-maintained and large user-share

* lowest common denominator for most deployments; regardless on if it's cloud, SBCs, bare-metal servers or desktop, Debian's default installation has a base set of packages for any scenario; just enough that you don't miss anything vital but not making opinionated choices when there is one to be made. For anything I use it for, the only additional things that go on all machines is userspace utilities like vim/tmux/htop. I never felt a need to remove anything.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#346
God, I could not hate Snap more. At least a .snap file can be mounted as a SquashFS and salvage what you can to run the program without snapd. Unrelated, but it is curious that some applications I have encountered depended on some proprietary library. To the bin it went. :D

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#348

I tried not to interpret the article in the worst possible way, but I failed, it feels disingenuous to me. I don't think comparing ppa's to snaps is a good comparison. ppa's have the disadvantage of potential dependency problems which might break things like upgrades, and that has nothing to do with having a distributed store. snaps solve this and that has nothing to do with a proprietary single company controlled st…

I'm sorry you feel this is disingenuous. I really tried to explain why there is only one Snap Store from a neutral point of view. Let me know if you have any tips to make it more genuine.

You are right that this has nothing to do with the dependency problems Snap solves. Snap does many things differently but this article only focusses on one to keep it relatively short.

This article doesn't try to present a comprehensive comparison and definitely not between Snap and PPA. The article only focuses on the question why there is only one Snap store. The answer to this question has nothing to do with Snap bundling dependencies.

I also wrote a separate blog post about bundling dependencies here: https://merlijn.sebrechts.be/blog/2020-07-06-why-snap-flatpa...

That blogpost lumps Snap and Flatpak together since, for the sake of bundling dependencies, the two technologies are pretty similar.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I am developer and I have experience with different technology and with different kind of users, no I would not try to get the largest number of users. What we need is more science and data, I would not do X because some designer things looks cool or some here developer wants to play with some cool tech. For example a few years ago KDE Plasma had a maintainer in charge with a big ego(yeah, KDE has some people…

Tray icons in Gnome are not about big ego guy. The issue is entirely different, rooted in different problem. Systray appeared for a first time in Windows 95, which had no notion of services, say nothing of user services. Here it started to be abused, at first for quicklaunch scenarios (where an app preloaded itself into ram or disk cache at least at login, so when the user clicked the app icon, it launched "quickly")…

This logic is fine for GNOME apps, sure use client side decorations, use background jobs, remove advanced options etc but GNOME can't force non GNOME apps top follow their big ego designer vision, there are also old application and games that can't just implement client side decorationbs because GNOME want to force their shit.

So I see people like you that complaint hat Canonical did not implement X in snap(like third party repo) but defend GNOME that is rejecting keeping functionality with other applications with excuses like

- GNOME devs are too busy to read and accept your patch (maybe Canonical devs are busy too)

- GNOME devs don't want to add your patch that adds a checkbox to give you an option because is to much work maintining it (maybe Canonical thinks is too much work to maintain that third party repos patch)

- GNOME devs don't want to support other applications and toolkits, is only the GNOME way or if you don't like it use KDE (then same should apply for snaps, you don't like it use flatpack)

- systemd has some Google DNS hardcoded int he code, if you don't like it ask your distro to change it or recompile it yourself (then please apply same for snap, ask you distro to recompile, patch it , etc)

- there is a large number of GNOME users that want tray icons, then GNOME response is "you are stupid, we know better, use something else or patch the code with an extension - you should apply same excuse for Canonical)

Hope I made it clear, there are some double standards here, so we should be more consistent, probably both snap and GNOME are less user targeted and dev/designer ego driven since nobody pays for the product the user requests are ignored.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#350
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see Linux users demanding snaps in large numbers For me, Snap is the best package system. When I publish new version of Wekan Snap, it's updated very fast to those 8k servers around the world where someone has installed Wekan. Canonical has paid all that huge bandwidth, server and admin cost to maintain snap build and download servers. For me, publishing Snap version is free. When Snap is updating on some s…

Sorry, what I meant is that people that don't run Ubuntu don't seem interested in having snap by default in their distribution , at least I only see the voices shouting that deb is enough or flatpack is better. So in the end if I were Canonical leader I would say fuck them and now put my few developers on implementing a different store for the other distributions.

Why would Canonical leader use such words like "fuck them" ? That's just a absurd conspiracy theory.

For example Wekan Snap is used in very many different distros: https://snapcraft.io/wekan

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