The one app I can't stand as a snap is firefox, it took a minute to navigate to the first webpage every time I start up. The rest are or more less fine I think, but flatpak meets my needs for most other applications.
Also command line tools are terrible as snaps. And the worst part is you have no idea why they won't work. It doesn't tell you that snap is the problem. It just doesn't work.
It look me about two hours to realize that snap was the problem when I was trying to run Mastodon in a Docker container. That was the last straw before I moved to Fedora.
Snap can’t read anything outside of the /home directory, and there’s no way to fix that except changing the source code and recompiling it.
I don't mind Snaps in a vacuum, but the unforgivable thing is that they messed with the package repo so that instead of installing a deb package as I intended, it installs a Snap stub which I did not want. If Canonical hadn't forced them on users in that way, I'd have been fine with them.
Instead, back to Debian I went (sorry I ever left, actually)
Personally, I use Debian and gravitate towards flat paks, but I'm starting to question whether this is just one of those hills Linux users arbitrarily choose to die on a la systemd/wayland? I suppose one of the advantages of an opinionated OS is a vast array of opinions
I didn't until apps started breaking. The snap version of steam, Firefox, and Unity (I think?) all started to have issues. When I googled around people would often ask "deb or snap"? I uninstalled the snap packages and installed the deb packages and most of my issues went away.
I ultimately switched to Linux Mint because I kept having stability issues and I was just desperate for a solution. But snap was not a great experience for me.
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.
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.
