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Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

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Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#571

Post by the_why_of_y »

sofixa wrote: post #218
nicolaslem wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is just Ubuntu doing Ubuntu things. Like most of their other endeavors, like Upstart or Unity, they will eventually get bored with snap and adopt the most common tool instead.

Just to be clear, Canonical are often the first ones with a solution to a problem (Unity, Mir, Upstart, Snap, LXD predate alternatives trying to solve the same problems existing in existing software), they just usually use the ensuing "war" for adoption due to varying degrees of bad strategy, Red Hat being more popular, poor technical choices or just bad luck.

Often? Only in case of Upstart and LXD (I'm not familiar with the latter's history).

Here's Mark Shuttleworth in 2010:

The next major transition for Unity will be to deliver it on Wayland, the OpenGL-based display management system.

We came to the conclusion that any such effort would only create a hard split in the world which wasn’t worth the cost of having done it. There are issues with Wayland, but they seem to be solvable, we’d rather be part of solving them than chasing a better alternative. So Wayland it is.

https://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551

Then in 2013, Unity 8 was released with Mir.

Snap was largely developed in parallel with FlatPak (called xdg-app initially).

There was a talk about the plans at GUADEC 2013:

https://www.superlectures.com/guadec2013/sandboxed-applicati...

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#572

Post by the_why_of_y »

cprecioso wrote: post #308

It's surprising to me how Canonical keeps "losing" when positing competing technologies (e.g.: Upstart, Mir, Unity, and now Snap)

There is a common theme to all of them: Canonical retains exclusive control over the development by requiring assignment of copyright of all contributions to Canonical.

The obvious consequence is that anybody who doesn't get paid by Canonical and wants to work in the area decides to contribute to the community based CLA-free competitor project (systemd, Wayland, Gnome/KDE/..., Flatpak), which eventually becomes more powerful/flexible/reliable due to lots of companies and individuals contributing.

(The oldest of the CLA projects was the "Bazaar" distributed version control system, almost completely forgotten now)

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#573

Post by phendrenad2 »

wilonth wrote: post #161

Wow they're still pushing snaps, the project with some the worst engineering I've ever seen. - Extremely slow at doing anything, even the most basic commands. - Ridiculous auto-update mechanism (you can't even disable it wtf). - Random, nonsense limitations (why can't I open dot files and dot directories???). So terrible that for most apps that I installed with snaps I end up installing the deb version later on. What…

This is the kind of attitude that holds Linux back. Nothing is ever good enough, but "doing nothing" is considered just fine. Snaps aren't perfect, but adding "the ability to edit dotfiles" later on is a whole heck of a lot easier than whatever you're a fan of.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#574

Post by phendrenad2 »

hnzix wrote: post #535
conor- wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like hunting down drivers hasn't been an issue on Linux for any relatively modern machine I've run in over 10 years. If it really is something that you have had problems with, maybe try PopOS instead of Debian. The restricting non-free repos by default out of principle with Debian can sometimes get annoying when you need to install certain non-free drivers (looking at you Nvidia), but PopOS is a really well-po…

>I feel like hunting down drivers hasn't been an issue on Linux for any relatively modern machine I've run in over 10 years. Try installing any Debian flavor on an Intel Mac. Keyboard, mouse, bluetooth, wifi drivers all incredibly hard to get working. Need to perform some voodoo extracting the drivers from a MacOS image then making them available during boot.

Debian is not the competitor to Ubuntu, Mint is.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#575

Post by phendrenad2 »

raffraffraff wrote: post #488
five82 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canonical makes decisions based on their own self interest. Not for their users and not for the benefit of the greater community. That's what drove everyone away.

But driving everyone away isn't in their own best interest. They're basically shitting in their own well.

They're probably doing just fine selling support for Ubuntu Server.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#576

Post by phendrenad2 »

booleandilemma wrote: post #441
Saris wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite experience with snaps is Firefox just closing in the middle of doing something because it wanted to update, and it didn't even bother to check if I was using it first.

I specifically moved away from Windows to get away from automatic behavior like that. When will these system designers realize that the system shouldn't do anything observable without me telling it to? Imagine if a kitchen oven decided to perform a self-clean without any human interaction "because it hadn't performed one in awhile".

If you're moving away from Windows, why not go all the way and install Manjaro or something? Snaps are meant to emulate the Windows ease of use, including the automatic behavior that you dislike (but many users like).

> When will these system designers realize that the system shouldn't do anything observable without me telling it to?

My vehicle changes gears without asking me. If someone makes a broad statement like "when are these vehicle designers going to realize that a vehicle shouldn't do anything observable without me telling it to?" I'm just going to laugh at them.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#577

Post by phendrenad2 »

Jnr wrote: post #174
wilonth wrote: post #161

Wow they're still pushing snaps, the project with some the worst engineering I've ever seen. - Extremely slow at doing anything, even the most basic commands. - Ridiculous auto-update mechanism (you can't even disable it wtf). - Random, nonsense limitations (why can't I open dot files and dot directories???). So terrible that for most apps that I installed with snaps I end up installing the deb version later on. What…

For some reasons they ship it with servers as well. So the first task after getting ubuntu up and running, you have to uninstall snap.

I'm curious - what's wrong with snaps on the server?

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#578

Post by phendrenad2 »

sacnoradhq wrote: post #507
wilonth wrote: post #161

Wow they're still pushing snaps, the project with some the worst engineering I've ever seen. - Extremely slow at doing anything, even the most basic commands. - Ridiculous auto-update mechanism (you can't even disable it wtf). - Random, nonsense limitations (why can't I open dot files and dot directories???). So terrible that for most apps that I installed with snaps I end up installing the deb version later on. What…

Canonical is an expert marksman footgunner. They take bizarre risks and insist on reinventing things badly. Security, infrastructure ecosystem integration, and defaults that don't work with reality. The advantage of RHEL/Cent and sometimes Fedora server-side is it's boringly-reliable. The kernel especially. For development, the userland isn't great and the desktop is mediocre. Qubes is interesting for security, conta…

Canonical makes a server OS and also releases a desktop version for nostalgia reasons (my guess). They should just deprecate Ubuntu Desktop already and be done with it.

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#579

Post by josteink »

groestl wrote: post #557
josteink wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve switched everything off Ubuntu but my servers. That bit is just too much effort and I can’t be bothered yet. Next server though. Not Ubuntu for sure. Probably Debian?

I chose Debian, FWIW.

How is Debian-support for ZFS these days?

Is it doable to setup Debian with a ZFS root file system?

Re: Ubuntu stops shipping Flatpak by default

#580

Post by goodpoint »

koolba wrote: post #125
lelanthran wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At which point was nodejs five years older than the distro it shipped on? Not being facetious, genuinely curious.

> At which point was nodejs five years older than the distro it shipped on? https://askubuntu.com/questions/1259840/why-an-old-nodejs-ve... Nodejs v4.x was "new" when Ubuntu 16.04 LTS came out. It was added to its apt repos, LTS releases are supported for 5+ years, and LTS policy is not to update major versions of software within a release. So while nodejs was pumping out new major versions every 6-months, people run…

That's a feature not a bug. People use LTS because they need stable platforms they can rely on.
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