this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Why is Ubuntu pushing snaps so hard? Is there objectively a benefit to them apart from Flatpak?
It seems like an odd hill to die on.
Canonical is just weird like that, it seems. They tend to pick something and fixate on it really hard (Eg. Unity desktop, Mir, that convergent phone thing, now Snaps) and work on it until it's almost really good, then they get fixated on the next shiny thing and dump whatever they were doing to go chase that instead.
Sooo they have ADHD and suffer with hyperfixation with the rest of us ADHDers?
Except that this is a corporation so it doesn't have ADHD.
So a corporation is just run by robots and not humans? Makes perfect sense.
A corporation is operated through a series of set rules, which dictate how it runs. It is structured in a way that is tangible, whereas the structure of the human mind is currently only theorized. I am reluctant to use terms like ADHD to describe corporations because that is prescribing a list of abstracted properties to them which we can definitely see that it doesn't have internally. Unless the there is a set of unchanging principles that is the list of ADHD symptoms, no, not ADHD.
They're the Google of Linux.
How so?
They bring their projects about 80% to the point of being good, then let them stall while they focus on the next new thing. Later the project may be suddenly cancelled.
Tbf I think convergence could be the killer feature which pushes mobile Linux into large-scale adoption. Also Purism has its Librem 5 phone as convergent, too. It's not just Canonical.
The worst page from the Google and Microsoft playbook
Giving up on Unity was a shame
There's a benefit to Canonical, the corp that maintains Ubuntu, which is that while snaps are open source tech, the server for the snap store is closed source and snap can't be configured to point at another store.
In other words, it's about centralized control.
There are some advantages to the tech itself, like live auto-updating, which is good for security-critical server apps, but over all I'm not a fan.
I believe you're completely right here, except that snapd can be configured to point to another store, though it's not very well documented.. I did find the piece of information once :).
But the thing is that the client still only supports one app backing site at a time. So if you pick another one, you lose visibility to the other store. I doubt even updates work as they should.
So it's really about building technology that is geared towards centralized control, whereas basically anyone can host flatpak packages and give ref links to them.
I don't think that the board members are sitting there and pondering how they can exercise more control on the user via snaps.
The auto updating is a nice benefit but it doesn't seem like a big enough benefit to allocate so many developer man hours into. I would think that Canonical would realize that the developers time is better spent making features the users want.
But what do I know? I'm just someone posting on Lemmy not a Canonical board member haha
Snap provides features that users want. Here, I'm a user and I really appreciate those features. Features that have been improving my life for at least 5 years.
Snaps are used for Ubuntu's IOT distro, and also for their upcoming immutable desktop. They even ship kernel and mesa as snap, which makes updating less likely to break a system (in case of a crash while updating, user error, ...).
That's why they push snap. Canonical doesn't mainly aim to make a apps available to all distros like flatpak does. Just like now where all distros need their own packages, snap will coexist with other package formats.
For the user it's unimportant how apps are installed, as long as they're available.
Because they controll snaps. Their backend is proprietary and they do not support any other way of distribution.
Now there are some objective benefits to Snaps compared to Flatpaks, at least so I was told. Apparently they offer significantly better documentation and integrate more tightly with the system, allowing you to do more stuff with them.
This was a while back tho, I don't know where Flatpak stands today
Canonical also sells private Snaps repos for a shy amount of 30 000$ per year
https://www.nitrokey.com/news/2021/nextbox-why-we-decided-and-against-ubuntu-core
Yes, it's good that they make money with such services. Services like hosting are a great way.
It could be like the old RPM vs DEB arguments. Technically, one could have argued at the time that RPM was explicitly singled out in the Linux Standard base.
However, these days, DEB certainly feels more common (although, from my understanding, Redhat/Slack is big in enterprise, so i'm not actually sure which is more common).
Except both RPM and DEB are fully open-source. Flatpak is open-source, Snap is partly proprietary.