I know this thread is likely to quickly descend into 50 variants of “ew, snap”, but it’s a good write up of what is really a pretty interesting novel approach to the immutable desktop world.
As the article says, it could well be the thing that actually justifies Canonical’s dogged perseverance with snaps in the first place.
I actually don’t understand the issue people have with Snaps. The main gripe seems to be “It’s controlled by Canonical”.
But why is it an issue that Canonical controls a source of software for their own OS? Isn’t that the same with every distro’s repository?
This new entrant in the immutable space is not a replacement for ordinary Ubuntu
Not yet the replacement. It will be and I bet Canonical is targeting 26.04 LTS to do that. This is just the next step of trying to force all their users into Snap, just like when Flatpak was banned from being in by default of community-supported but official Ubuntu variants such as Xubuntu.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Ordinary desktop and server Ubuntu aren’t going anywhere, and the next release, numbered 24.04 and codenamed Noble Numbat as we mentioned last month, will be the default and come with all the usual editions and flavors.
Nor is this a whole new product: it is a graphical desktop edition of the existing Ubuntu Core distro, as we examined on its release in June last year, a couple of months after 22.04.
Ubuntu Core is Canonical’s Internet of Things (IoT) distro, intended to be embedded on edge devices, such as digital signs and smart displays.
Most of the major Linux vendors have immutable offerings, and The Reg has looked at several over the years, including MicroOS, the basis of SUSE’s next-gen enterprise OS ALP.
Former Canonical staffer Alan Pope demonstrated a Steam Deck running Ubuntu Core at the event, and his lengthy blog post about the experience contains some interesting details about how well the developer preview already works.
Compression of Flatpak apps is a key reason that Fedora now uses Btrfs, although it’s worth noting that, as of yet, Snap doesn’t include any form of deduplication between separate packages.
The original article contains 1,052 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
As much as I have issues with the snap implementation, I really want to live in a world where my base os is solid and everything else is easily updatable. LTS, with the latest apps.
Snap and flatpak achieve this, and I want more of that. Just less… frustrating. And less not-invented-here like.
And less not-invented-here like.
The only party playing that game is Canonical. Everybody else already agreed on Flatpak.
Snap has the ability to do the base system in a much more modular way and could be really cool for an immutable system. Forcing them on desktop users with their transitional deb packages and making it heavily integrated with only one repository really screwed or up.
I’m very excited about how the Linux community generally seems to be moving towards various approaches to immutable systems - all of them having in common that system updates are going to be a lot less likely to break. The future is looking good!
As long as we don’t end up with Linux systems designed like Android.
If anyone would lock their OS down like that, it would be Canonical.
