I agree, have seen so many people trying to document how to "desnap" Ubuntu and wondered why bother, you are fighting against what is now the whole point of Ubuntu while trying to use Ubuntu while so many other options exist.
I do happily encourage folks to explain why they left Ubuntu behind as I did (snaps). No confusion, just a reiteration of disappointment that they went from being my favorite distro to completely off my list with the snap stuff.
Why? I've heard this for years at this point, but as someone who rarely uses snaps because they're the only convenient option for software I'm using, I'm generally ambivalent about them.
People seem to hold really strong opinions about snap but I've never been able to get a straight answer, just a bunch of hand waving.
So that's admittedly not a good look for canonical, but my read of that is that if you're getting widely-known software from a developer who's publishing it to snap themselves, and you're cautious about your usage, snap is fine.
For example, essentially my only use of snap is to install certbot. If I follow the directions from certbot.eff.org precisely, then I'll get certbot installed and no issues.
I certainly agree that (a) the system is ripe for abuse and (b) should be self-hostable to support Free software. Both of these could be fixed by canonical opening it up.
My biggest hit was when they pushed browsers to snaps, and I couldn't do some of my school projects because my school stuff was on a separate disk that the snap was not allowed to access. (Had to use o365, and wasn't installing windows to write my papers)
It’s not successful though. Like, maybe if your measure of success is that it’s usable, sure. But no other OSes have adopted it. Not even Ubuntu’s downstream OSes like Mint or Pop_OS!.
Users don’t like it, vendors don’t like it, other OS maintainers don’t like it. I’m not sure why that would be considered successful.
So, I used ubuntu for pretty close to 20 years and it was my go to distro. I have had hundreds upon hundreds of servers running ubuntu.
Last few years I've been moving away from ubuntu because of their lack of respect for their core users. They have no clear vision and when they do, its a magnificently shitty one like the donkey balls decision to enfrorce snap on everything.
I will still have some ubuntu servers to take care of, but every new server I set up will be fedora.
snaps are a proprietary vendor-locked format, the only redeeming quality is being able to run them in cli (once Flatpak get that too, there is no valid reason for snaps to exist).
I just find it midly infuriating (if that even is a thing, meaning I hate it but it's not that significant for me to distro hop on my work laptop) to have two "universal" package formats on my system with Canonical shoving the objectively worse one (from a free/libre pov) down my throat...
no you didn't, you can install flatpak using the terminal but iirc flatpak are mostly made with GUI applications in mind, while snaps support installing command line utils quite well
Nix, guix, flatpak, and OSI images are all better "universal" packages managers on sheer technical merits while also not be a vendor locked proprietary solution.
Multiple standards are good, initially. Multiple visions and approaches can get tested. The best hopefully displaced the rest, whilst picking up all the other good ideas.
If there was only one standard we would get stuck with snaps with no alternatives.
So I didn't realize that the snaps logo is an origami bird.
"It was like a piece of self-opening origami, or a rosebud blooming into a rose in just a few seconds. Where just a few moments earlier there had been a smoothly curved black disk, there was now a bird. A bird, hovering there." - Douglas Adams, describing the Hitchhiker's Guide, Mk. II, from Mostly Harmless.
That is a very biased claim. It's like saying that the PS5 is the most successful gaming platform because God Of War: Ragnarök and Ghost Of Tsushima players prefer it over Xbox and PC.
Did they say it's the most successful project? Because Sony saying that the PS5 is a successful platform because players prefer it over other options doesn't seem biased at all. It's just an objective statement of fact
If you go to snapcraft.io, you can see snap being installed on many other distributions other than Ubuntu. It will not show you the exact numbers, but people willingly install it on their machines. I think that's successful.
I don't think "there exists an unknown number of non-Ubuntu machines with snap installed" is a valid metric when the general sentiment seems to be apathy. It's popular for the same reason Internet Explorer was popular -- it's forcibly installed with the default OS.
If the numbers were favorable, Canonical would release them.
What is the "general sentiment" tho? Sure, on Lemmy and Reddit communities I usually see people hate Snaps, but that's just a few thousands of people. Another metric of success could be developers maintaining their software as snaps. You will find that quite a lot of them do so.
I said "apathy", not "negative". The people who dislike snap have likely moved to other distributions, and I don't see any widespread praise considering Ubuntu's market share within the Linux ecosystem, so the most likely answer is that people either don't know or don't care about snap.
Whether or not an application is packaged as a snap is also a poor indication. Most of the software used in Ubuntu still comes from an APT repo, mostly official or sometimes a PPA. Many developers distribute their software exclusively as flatpaks, appimages, or binaries. Shit, Valve even recommends against using the snap version of Steam. By using your standard, snap would be considered an abject failure.
Snap doesn't really even have as many applications packaged as people think.
Snap's package count is often touted as being much higher than Flatpak's. However, this is misleading, as Snap allows the inclusion of many command-line interface (CLI) only packages that aren't well-suited for containerization.
The inclusion of these CLI-only packages drastically inflates Snap's overall package count, while Flatpak does not include as many standalone CLI tools.
Furthermore, packaging CLI tools as Snap or Flatpak packages doesn't really make much sense. A huge amount of CLI tools were never intended to be used inside a containerized environment like Snap. As a result, there will likely be compatibility issues and unsupported edge cases.
Additionally, there are already established universal packaging standards for CLI tools, such as Nix and Homebrew.
These packaging systems are better suited for distributing standalone CLI applications compared to containerized formats like Snap and Flatpak.
When Mozilla provide the firefox deb package - Why not give it then?
IMO snaps/flatpacks are slower to start, can't be updated while running, takes more diskspace, and takes longer time to update. With the isolation we also have different kind of problems - have you given it the correct permission?, and how do you get keepassxc browser extension to work with it(they dont support it)?
I installed mint on my second PC, and it's great. I feel like migrating my main, but I'm not sure it would go smoothly. I've had a lot of issues with my four months old Ubuntu install, lately the keyboard is nonfunctional at the login screen about half the time. Snaps are another reason making me want to leave it behind.
I found out I could dual boot Linux at work and went right for Mint. I think it’s great. It’s a nice pragmatic choice for people like me who love using Linux and are constantly in a bash prompt, but who don’t want to build up a system from scratch and who are fine not running the very latest.
It’s even downstream from some of the most popular distros out there, but without Canonical’s controversial shit.
Yeah I love it, Debian feels like opening a featureless gray box that just says "OS" on the front. Add whatever you want. A blank canvas. It's as close to "generic" Linux as you can get.
