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What are the problems with Ubuntu?
(lemm.ee)
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this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2024
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Snaps predate flatpaks (though not by very long - months I think, but not years).
But its not about just how it started. Snap was more focused on phones and servers, not on desktop in the beginning. And there were not much, because Snap was usable over the following years (like Flatpak). Canonical could see how the entire rest of the Linux communities and distributions adopted Flatpak and could have switched to it. But contrary to it, Canonical was very pushy about Snap. So my argument is, Canonical should have dropped Snap early when they still could (just like they did with Mir in example). But they didn't.
Obviously now its a different situation, but you were talking about the beginning in this reply.
You said Snap is a similar but alternative to Flatpak, implying that it was developed in response to Flatpak, which simply isn't the case.
Snap predates Flatpak, and it's clearly a big money maker for Canonical with their commercial customers who want things like confined but upgradable services in an airgapped environment. By the time Flatpak was making enough headway to be considered feasible to use, snaps were already pretty widely used and had several fairly big names like JetBrains, ROS and CircleCI publishing on snapcraft.io.
Flatpak cannot and was never intended to do all the things snap can, such as setting up system services or distributing kernels. So even if the assertion that snaps for desktop apps were a response to Flatpak were true (it's not), it doesn't make sense for Canonical to stop developing snap regardless, as desktop apps are only a tiny part of what snaps do.