305
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 43 points 7 months ago

People are annoyed by canonical shoving snaps into their mouth at every opportunity (people want to choose when to use them by themselves), but there are many legitimate reasons for existence of snap and flatpak. Here are some of them:

  • the app developers themselves are in full control of their app's distribution and updates instead of relying on distro maintainers. devs getting some angry mails for bugs already fixed but not yet included by distros is tale as old as time.
  • simplified dependency management. what's stopping the dev from packaging their app using distro's native package management instead? whelp, they don't want to deal with this stuff. It can be a hard work, and there are dozens of distros out there to support.
  • protecting users data. when you run an app installed from your distro's package manager, you know you can trust it because your distro maintainers have vetted the app to make sure it doesn't read your mail or your browser history or your ssh keys. when you download the app from a third party source, you can only pray to god that those apps won't mess with your data behind your back. You don't have to worry about that when you use sandboxed apps like flatpak.
[-] kautau@lemmy.world 40 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Yup, what makes flatpak more akin to the open source spirit is that new submissions to flathub are open source and rely on a PR model

https://docs.flathub.org/docs/for-app-authors/submission/

https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pulls

And software that exists on flathub is open and accessible in their repositories

https://github.com/orgs/flathub/repositories

Whereas snaps are a web based walled garden controlled by canonical

https://snapcraft.io/docs/using-the-snap-store

They both provide benefit as you explained, but flathub (flatpak’s default repo) is definitely more open in how it is handled

[-] hperrin@lemmy.world 13 points 7 months ago

You still have to worry about that with Flatpak. Like, don’t give a calculator app permission to read all your files and access the internet.

[-] rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee 9 points 7 months ago

but what if my calculator app needs to check its calculations with wolfram alpha

[-] ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

As an end user I actually love them (yes I know, sacrilege). Flatpak is my preference, but I also prefer pretty much anything to Ubuntu in its defailg state so that might have something to do with it.

[-] bluGill@kbin.social 3 points 7 months ago

None of the the benefits you state apply to something a distribution provides and so I don't understand why Ubuntu is pushing them.

[-] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Packaging applications is a hard work so they obviously want the devs to do it themselves. For example, canonical push hard so their users use snap for firefox because it's maintained by firefox devs themselves. Firefox updates very often and has complex build system, so I think canonical is tired of allocating significant resource to support it and want to stop maintaining firefox package if they can.

this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
305 points (96.4% liked)

linuxmemes

21263 readers
728 users here now

Hint: :q!


Sister communities:


Community rules (click to expand)

1. Follow the site-wide rules

2. Be civil
  • Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
  • Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
  • Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
  • Bigotry will not be tolerated.
  • These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
  • 3. Post Linux-related content
  • Including Unix and BSD.
  • Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of sudo in Windows.
  • No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
  • 4. No recent reposts
  • Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.

  • Please report posts and comments that break these rules!

    founded 1 year ago
    MODERATORS