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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?

#171

Post by boogies »

spanhandler wrote: post #164
boogies wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> • Nothing available that's as lightweight and good as Apple's "office"-type suite. I personally create markdown documents in vis (a text editor like vim, but lighterweight — > • Nothing as all-around good as Preview (yes, seriously). Not having ever needed to fill out a PDF form, I won’t comment. > • Worse battery life, partly due to worse OS optimizations and partly due to not having Safari available. Solutions to…

Yeah, I get there are other reasons people choose Linux—I do too, as I find Win10 intolerable as a working environment so if I'm not on Apple hardware, Linux is my only realistic option for getting things done while still being able to interact alright with the world outside my own computer. I just think that's a small set of the reasons one might find any Linux OS to represent a serious loss of functionality, versus…

Unfortunately I don’t use GNU/Linux on the go enough to give you a good answer. Surf specifically is probably not good for battery life and now I realize I probably shouldn't have brought it up in this context, because it spawns a separate process per window/tab — it’s noticeably slower than any other browser I’ve used. But GNOME Web/Epiphany though does seem lighter than FF from my limited use of it, worth testing. Personally I use Palemoon as a FF alternative without the shakeups and because the Pentadactyl (fork of Vimperator) extension is beautiful, but I can’t vouch for it’s efficiency.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#172

Post by rbecker »

roywashere wrote: post #127
blendergeek wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same "you are dead to me" ragers are often knee deep in google account / xbox account / netflix go anywhere accounts etc. While I am not GP, I am what of these people. I stay as far away as I can from cloud accounts unless I have the option to self host. I self host Nextcloud and I am soon going to self-host Matrix. I use F-Droid for my phone apps.

I think it is great to use F-Droid or Nextcloud if you want to! You can also use Debian or Arch if you want to. Why is it so bad that Ubuntu tries to innovate in their own way? It's not that there are no other linuxes to use?

The complaint was that Canonical was trying to make itself a gatekeeper, not some vague "innovate in their own way".

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#173

Post by type0 »

bityard wrote: post #114
ewzimm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agreed with everything you sid.

Ah, stop with the buzz words

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#174

Post by type0 »

dane-pgp wrote: post #139
ewzimm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why did you squeeze so many release names into that comment?

you would need to be a bookworm to know all of them

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#175

Post by galgalesh »

ubertaco wrote: post #115
abnercoimbre wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh. I'm a developer that is on early-version binaries often, and need to keep them frozen and update them manually. I shouldn't have to default to compiling from source. Can I bypass snap entirely without major issues? I like Ubuntu, but indeed, I left Windows 10 officially due to auto-updates.

Yeah, there's no reason you have to use Snap. You can even use flatpak on Ubuntu (I've just started trying that out myself).

The Yaru developers even publish their theme on Flathub so Flatpaks look good on Ubuntu.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#176

Post by mesebrec »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #20

"Interestingly, Canonical actually released an open-source prototype Snap store backend a few years ago, but there was very little interest from the community in in actually maintaining and running a second Snap store, so the project bit-rotted and became incompatible with the current Snap protocol." That open-source server was a single-python-file hacky prototype written in an employee's spare time. It's not surpris…

> Not only that, but this is the biggest omission of the truth: Making your own server is no longer possible because of assertions. All Snaps are now digitally signed by Canonical, so you actually need to have the end-user install a forked snap tool on their system to access the custom repository. You cannot disable this signing - your only way around it is to manually download the snap and install it with `--dangerous` through the CLI. And you won't get auto updates that way.

The blogpost is very clear that each _device_ is made to point to a single store. If you want to point it to a different store, you have to recompile snapd to include your own certificate.

This is why I talk about, for example, Manjaro having their own store. Since they compile snapd, they get to choose what certificate is used and so what store is being used.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#177

Post by boogies »

spanhandler wrote: post #121
AsyncAwait wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Curious about this, since as far as audio goes, as long as there's PulseAudio on the system, all others tend to have…

> Curious about this, since as far as audio goes, as long as there's PulseAudio on the system, all others tend to have compatibility with it in mind. There are hold-out ALSA users (even Linux OSS users still around, I think) and I gather people who need well-performing audio for Serious Work (particularly anything latency-sensitive or requiring that multiple streams be mixed at high quality without errors), and have…

Friendly ALSA user here :)!

I think the Pulse situation is very similar to the one with systemd (they’re even by the same author IIRC). There are some haters, but if you’re a hater-hater than you can just ignore them (eg. GNOME IUUC depends on both Pulse and systemd, and haters of the dependencies who want the DE just have to find their own shims, like Gentoo’s, deal with some error messages (random games and things often give me a lot of audio-related ones, but generally work ok anyway) or just leave for another DE or WM).

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#178

Post by djsumdog »

unixhero wrote: post #135
coreblocks wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I think it’s simpler than that. The Linux desktop experience is just terrible... I have never successfully installed a Linux distro without having to fiddle with some boot flag or some config file. Every major Linux desktop environment has been unreliable at best. Software support is fragmented across dozens of distros. I think WSL has been the biggest win for Linux on the desktop, but ironically it’s on win…

What year is this? Linux desktop experience is fantastic in 2020. It has been for several years. That's bordering FUD you're spreading.

Same here, and I prefer Linux systems that give me more control, so I take the time to install Void and Gentoo on all my machines (and even my primary dedicated server runs Void).

But whenever I try to install Ubuntu or Fedora on a laptop, it just installs and boots fine.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#179

Post by ppseafield »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #101
ppseafield wrote: post #66

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.

systemd's widespread adoption was somewhat controversial and took years. I realize Upstart didn't receive widespread adoption, and Canonical has historically liked to start its own products (Mir and Unity as you noted). But the discussion around systemd was not "everyone except Canonical thinks it's good", and Upstart had been in development for several years.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#180

Post by Ericson2314 »

galgalesh wrote: post #166
Ericson2314 wrote: post #126

Ahaha crap on all sides. Please come to Nix (or, hell, GUIX) and side-step all these issues.

Nix is really cool! You can actually use Nix to build Snap packages! Not sure if that's actually used a lot though. One of the advantages of Snap over Nix is that snap has security builtin. Snap is built to support a store where anyone can publish any application without curation. Nix Flakes look really cool for third-parties to "publish" applications for Nix, but I wonder how they will do security.. In Snap, the def…

The building of nix packages is completely sandboxed and secure. The running of them is currently an after-thought.

- https://spectrum-os.org/ is a big idea for secure running of applications, which leverages Nix for some things.

- I would like to see some CloudABI/Capsicum experiments, as anything that is not capability based seems baroque, difficult to, ill-fitting the problem at hand, and generally going to end in tears.

- There is currently some wrapping around systemd-nspawn which could be improved.

BTW when I say "The running of them is currently an after-thought" this isn't as bad as it sounds. I would say all the good solutions are not the scope of Nix, but instead the scope of NixOS, Nix home-manager, nix-darwin, etc. Still, a real problem that deserves a solution. Thanks for bringing it up.

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