Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why is there only one Snap Store?

merlijn.sebrechts.be

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 362 posts

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#241

Post by m4rtink »

School-Cotton wrote: post #231
unixhero wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Example from 2020: Running Ubuntu with two displays each of which has a different scaling factor requires switching to Wayland, because on X11, any window that touches the edge of one of the displays will run unusably slowly. (I don’t know why.) A non-technical “typical desktop user” would never have figured this out. This is on a fully supported Linux machine (XPS 13 9300 Developer Edition).

Well, thats mostly due to Ubuntu still defaulting to X. Fedora switched to Wayland by default back in 2016 and even RHEL 8 (released 2019) defaults to Wayland.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#242

Post by m4rtink »

djsumdog wrote: post #178
unixhero wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I recently noticed how severely is Android limitted in this during the recent Android Firefox update fiasco.

On desktop linux I could have just backed up the profile folder and downgraded the package & it might not have hit the repositories at all due to negative user feedback.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#243

Post by pseudalopex »

galgalesh wrote: post #128
rosywoozlechan wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Launchpad is also objectively more complex and hard to use than alternatives, and subjectively I'd say it's ugly and looks dated. Launchpad isn't probably something people want to use because of product design, and thus there's not much activity around it outside of Canonical. I think it would be silly to assume that a separate project that is liked wouldn't get traction outside of Canonical because of their experien…

> Launchpad is also objectively more complex and hard to use than alternatives, and subjectively I'd say it's ugly and looks dated Launchpad is _really_ old though. When it was open sourced, there were very few alternatives and those were often even more complex and harder to use. I think part of the reason why it was almost never used was because it does so much: project management, bug trackers, build service, pack…

It was tied to Bazaar until 2015 too.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#244

Post by m4rtink »

galgalesh wrote: post #148
justaguy88 wrote: post #5

What does snap do that flatpak doesn't?

Snaps can contain _any_ piece of Linux software, from kernels to the printing stack, to PulseAudio and finally desktop applications. Flatpak only focuses on Desktop Apps. For more information, see : https://merlijn.sebrechts.be/blog/2020-07-03-snap-vs-flatpak... Another big difference is that the sandbox of Snap is much more granular. Snap uses AppArmor to mediate the _existing_ Linux api's. This allows you to give a…

Snaps being able to install kernel modules still disturbs me even today...

Seems like Canonical is crammjng everything they can into Snap - free software, privacy & security be damned!

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#245

Post by m4rtink »

curt15 wrote: post #96
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.

>Well, if you are building an IoT Device, lots of stuff for reliability. Automatic rollbacks, self-repairing, immutable FS... For that there is ostree, which is already supported by at least one major embedded systems vendor ( https://docs.windriver.com/bundle/Wind_River_Linux_Tutorial_... ).

BTW, OSTree is also the technplogy behind Fedora Silverblue, Fedora IoT and modern versions of Coee OS. Also flatpaks use OSTree internally for deduplication of all runtimes and flatpaks & for diff only downloads.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#246

Post by School-Cotton »

m4rtink wrote: post #241
School-Cotton wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Example from 2020: Running Ubuntu with two displays each of which has a different scaling factor requires switching to Wayland, because on X11, any window that touches the edge of one of the displays will run unusably slowly. (I don’t know why.) A non-technical “typical desktop user” would never have figured this out. This is on a fully supported Linux machine (XPS 13 9300 Developer Edition).

Well, thats mostly due to Ubuntu still defaulting to X. Fedora switched to Wayland by default back in 2016 and even RHEL 8 (released 2019) defaults to Wayland.

I feel like that just reinforces my point. Figuring out which random unsupported distro to install on the Linux laptop you bought is even less feasible for non-technical users than choosing a different login session on Ubuntu.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#247

Post by m4rtink »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #102
AgentME wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And all the systrm stuff is immutable and managged by OSTree. This makes it posdoble to diff only download a new system state and then atomically switch to it after reboot. And if you hit any issues with it, just boot to the previous one (you can have multiple previous states).

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#248

Post by m4rtink »

barrkel wrote: post #161
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A mounted FS per installed application so you can run different versions side by side. Does it strike anyone else as very telling that people looked at the problem of "we can't install more than one version of an application at a time because of how we structure our filesystem and hardcode paths" and decided that the solution was "let's give each application its own filesystem!"?

ISTM that anything which lets you install multiple versions side by side will require each version to have pinned versions of dependencies, transitively, until it's very close to the dominant node, which ultimately is the OS API, which in turn, done right, is backward compatible. You can implement that versioned dependency DAG as a database of versioned libraries etc. combined with a version pinning database; or you…

For the record Flatpak solves the same issue without mountpoint spam by using OSTree zo store flatpaks and their shared runtimes. Not only that, it gets full deduplication of everything and diff downloads just by using OSTree.

AFAIK Snap has no deduplication of installed stuff & not even any dhared runtimes. Not sure if it has diff downloads.

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#249

Post by coldtea »

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…

>You're not going to get within a thousand miles of monetizing the ecosystem by gatekeeping it -- the moment you even so much as assert the position of gatekeeper you're trying to create for yourselves you're dead to me.

On the other hand, at that point they might finally be a great option for millions of Windows / macOS users...

Re: Why is there only one Snap Store?

#250

Post by coldtea »

the_af wrote: post #215
kunai wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of usability, yes, but the problem with Linux in recent years has rarely been usability, it's the lack of workstation-level applications that are readily available on Windows and MacOS. As long as Linux lacks native support for Autodesk, Adobe CC, Office 365, FL Studio, Pro Tools, etc. and dozens of other niche programs by ISVs it will never approach the mainstream with any sort of widespread appeal. Current…

That seems like a moving goalpost to me. First, it wasn't usable. Then, it didn't have drivers. Then, it crashed a lot. Now it doesn't have Autodesk stuff? For the record, my mom doesn't know what Autodesk is. A "desktop" for me is where you can play movies, edit documents, browse the net and check email.

>That seems like a moving goalpost to me.

Reality is a moving goalpost itself. The desktops (Windows, macOS) aren't in some standstill waiting for Linux desktops to catch up.

But what you described isn't a "moving goalposts" case anyway. It's problems that need to be solved one after another and which all were initially present as issues.

Since at first, it wasn't usable, it wouldn't matter if it has Autodesk apps. Usability was more important.

Once it got usable, it still didn't matter if it had Autodesk apps, when it didn't have drivers.

Then, when it got the drivers, that only meant you could use your printer, wifi, bluetooth, etc. But the "crashing a lot" would be a problem greater still, greater than the lack of commercial apps.

>A "desktop" for me is where you can play movies, edit documents, browse the net and check email.

And for billions of people it's those things, plus work stuff they need to be able to run, multimedia creation they need once in a while, game stuff they like to play and so on...

Now that it does have most things in order, the lack of commercial apps is another problem it should work on (when it comes to people's needs).

Post reply on HN