Thissss

I've been on Ubuntu 14.04 until mid this year and now I have a new build with 22.04.

I was cool to have an updated Chromium via snap on 14.04, but it's bullshit that the latest LTS release relies on snaps for FF.

I made sure to remove that shitty ass version and I installed FF the classic way.

because it's so easy 🤷‍♂️

I legit have no idea how Mint or Pop is not the default by now.

Say you have a web browser, and to play videos it needs some codecs and a player, and to display pages it needs fonts, and to ... on and on.

Before Snaps, when you installed the browser it would install the programs it needed at the same time, because the developer designed it to do so.

With Snaps, the program, and everything it needs, and everything they need, and they need, on down the chain all gets zipped together.

The good is that dependency management is easy, everything is in one place. The bad is that they're slow to launch because of how everything is stored, and you now end up with many copies of the dependencies, and their dependencies, on your hard drive instead of 1.

The above is just representative, but those who prefer optimized systems do not like snaps. Those who like things tidy with easy dependencies are wrong. I mean, they like snaps.

Snap is a universal packaging format (like flatpak) developed by Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu).

Look up snap and flatpak, they're both based on a distro agnostic image/packaging model that allows developers to package for multiple distros rather than building native packaging for every single one. Both systems also solve the problem of two softwares requiring separate versions of the same dependency which is a fiddly problem at best for native packages.

Personally I'm a fan of flatpak, snap is similar but wholly driven by Canonical and their business interests.

Both have features that provide a solidly good reason to use them, there isn't a clear "better" system yet. I prefer Flatpak personally but snap still handles some cases (daemon software run by the system or as root) better than flatpak.

Fedora is a great choice too, that's where I point people who are coming from Ubuntu most of the time. I'm not the biggest redhat fan these days but Fedora strikes a good balance between stability and staying up to date.

No they fucking don't asswipe, how dare you? The fuck is your problem? I'm going to burn your house down.

wtf?! docker is installed from snap now? does that mean your docker container is actually running inside a snap container?

Sometimes apps installed through snaps have borked UI.

As far as I'm concerned Flatpak has won the "universal Linux package manager" war.

Snap is a non-starter because of its proprietary back end, appimage has no distribution or automation built in. Flatpak has its faults (why does it put things in /var of all places?) but it's the best I've seen.

I'd like to add: I think it's won not by being the best, but being the least worst. I would like to invite whoever came up with that com.flatpak.FlatPak bullshit to consider a career more suited to their skill set than computer programming, such as vagrancy.

I really like flatpak! But it has its limitations. Thats okay!

There is just a space for containerized images of desktop apps that are distro independent. Linus talks about this at a QA, but having a maintrainer for every app and every distro under the sun is just a waste (he used his diving app as an example). Flat park is a good solution for packaging up apps, and it makes sense for stand alone apps that have a lot of moving parts and don't need to integrate with the rest your intro. Their are basically 5 apps that I use everyday that install through flatpak. Stuff like discord and Joplin.

At the same time, if something is supported through the distro package manager directly, I would rather install through that. Especially for core system components, but also for apps that aren't really daily drivers for me. I definitely feel like I have to actively maintain flatpak installations, so if I can install without a flatpak, I would rather not. For small apps, especially simple command line apps, their probably isn't that much maintenance work to get them on the distro anyway.

It's as close to a "universal packaging system" as can get now.

There was a lot of talk back in time, when Ubuntu decided to forcefully shove snaps onto users. The thing is, Ubuntu could have embraced flatpaks like many other distros but it chose snaps which is not ideal for people who like an OS whose primary goals revolve around freedom and privacy. You see, it is the proprietary nature of snaps that gets them this hate.

Appimage and other packaging methods don't get this hate because they are open source and users have a "choice". What we are seeing against snaps is the result of forcing people to a choice, ofcourse the people in question are linux users - people who are famous about taking freedom of choice seriously. Yes, you can get ride of snaps on Ubuntu but you can get rid of lot of ads and stuff on windows with a lot of tinkering too - I think you see the point.

Many people tend to have a preference for flatpaks because they do basically what snaps do but better and ofcourse flatpaks fit into the "freedom and privacy" spirit of linux.

Solid choice

The thing about Ubuntu and snaps is that they are pushing it and “forcing” its users to use it.

You can uninstall it using sudo apt remove snapd but if you then try to install eg. firefox using sudo apt install firefox — voilà! — snapd is back.

The comic is depicting someone who doesn't want to use snaps then being upset when they run into snaps after choosing a disto that is known for snaps. The comic is not making fun of people who like or dislike snaps, it's making fun of people who dislike snaps but then choose to use a disto with snaps.