It’s not successful though. Like, maybe if your measure of success is that it’s usable, sure. But no other OSes have adopted it. Not even Ubuntu’s downstream OSes like Mint or Pop_OS!.
Users don’t like it, vendors don’t like it, other OS maintainers don’t like it. I’m not sure why that would be considered successful.
Correct me if I’m wrong but Ubuntu is the mostly used Linux desktop OS out there so I wouldn’t call it unsuccessful.
Hm. And you’d give Snaps the credit for that?
that’s not relevant here although It would be even more successful without snaps imo
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)
“But the Calamares versions have an install option without Snaps”
Well that also doesnt have a webbrowser and will install snaps the second you want one
So they have somewhere a dpkg hook but still install it if you toggle that option?
It is the same thing. Just that base Ubuntu supposedly doesnt have snap, but
sudo apt install firefoxinstalls snap and then snap firefox.You should add a PPA before installing so it has a source for non-snap Firefox
Either that or stop babysitting canonical and use debian instead
They also called unity successful at some point
At least you could use a different desktop if you didn’t like it.
Unity was a nice DE. Being on KDE since 12 years, I still miss some of its features, e.g. merging the menu items with the title bar.
And yet they abandoned it.
Yeah, I was passed when they went away from it. It was great for small screen devices.
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
It’s much worse.
The snap store is proprietary.
I hate snaps, but NextCloud snap is way easier to than the other methods, so it gets a pass… Only one
Over docker compose? You just apply the file and you are good to go.
Upstart and Unity are waiting for you.
Don’t forget Mir!
I knew I’d find some receipts in here.
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
/homedirectory, and there’s no way to fix that except changing the source code and recompiling it.
I know why I hate snap, no confusion here.
snap (especially firefox beeing one) made me an arch user
So, I used ubuntu for pretty close to 20 years and it was my go to distro. I have had hundreds upon hundreds of servers running ubuntu.
Last few years I’ve been moving away from ubuntu because of their lack of respect for their core users. They have no clear vision and when they do, its a magnificently shitty one like the donkey balls decision to enfrorce snap on everything.
I will still have some ubuntu servers to take care of, but every new server I set up will be fedora.
Because fuck snaps, thats why
I had like 4 snaps installed in my system and it was hogging like 60Gb of storage. What the actual fuck.
I wish I kept the names of the dependencies, I just ran a command to remove all snaps and the snap itself.
Am I talking bullshit here? I saw my disk drop 60gb after I did that but I have no evidence.
successful project
That is a very biased claim. It’s like saying that the PS5 is the most successful gaming platform because God Of War: Ragnarök and Ghost Of Tsushima players prefer it over Xbox and PC.
If you go to snapcraft.io, you can see snap being installed on many other distributions other than Ubuntu. It will not show you the exact numbers, but people willingly install it on their machines. I think that’s successful.
I don’t think “there exists an unknown number of non-Ubuntu machines with snap installed” is a valid metric when the general sentiment seems to be apathy. It’s popular for the same reason Internet Explorer was popular – it’s forcibly installed with the default OS.
What is the “general sentiment” tho? Sure, on Lemmy and Reddit communities I usually see people hate Snaps, but that’s just a few thousands of people. Another metric of success could be developers maintaining their software as snaps. You will find that quite a lot of them do so.
I said “apathy”, not “negative”. The people who dislike snap have likely moved to other distributions, and I don’t see any widespread praise considering Ubuntu’s market share within the Linux ecosystem, so the most likely answer is that people either don’t know or don’t care about snap.
Whether or not an application is packaged as a snap is also a poor indication. Most of the software used in Ubuntu still comes from an APT repo, mostly official or sometimes a PPA. Many developers distribute their software exclusively as flatpaks, appimages, or binaries. Shit, Valve even recommends against using the snap version of Steam. By using your standard, snap would be considered an abject failure.
Snap doesn’t really even have as many applications packaged as people think. Snap’s package count is often touted as being much higher than Flatpak’s. However, this is misleading, as Snap allows the inclusion of many command-line interface (CLI) only packages that aren’t well-suited for containerization.
The inclusion of these CLI-only packages drastically inflates Snap’s overall package count, while Flatpak does not include as many standalone CLI tools.
Furthermore, packaging CLI tools as Snap or Flatpak packages doesn’t really make much sense. A huge amount of CLI tools were never intended to be used inside a containerized environment like Snap. As a result, there will likely be compatibility issues and unsupported edge cases.
Additionally, there are already established universal packaging standards for CLI tools, such as Nix and Homebrew. These packaging systems are better suited for distributing standalone CLI applications compared to containerized formats like Snap and Flatpak.
Did they say it’s the most successful project? Because Sony saying that the PS5 is a successful platform because players prefer it over other options doesn’t seem biased at all. It’s just an objective statement of fact
What’s wrong with being Robert Baratheon
He downloaded a snap while drunk…and we know what happens from there …
He downloaded Snaps and ate them.
That reminds me…
I miss those Robert Baratheon memes from the freefolk sub
We all miss the sentient bobby_b bot
If you don’t like snaps, don’t use the distribution by the company who tries to establish them.
And also warn newcomers not to invest time into those distros.
I agree, have seen so many people trying to document how to “desnap” Ubuntu and wondered why bother, you are figuring against what is now the whole point of Ubuntu whole trying to use Ubuntu while so many other options exist.
I do happily encourage folks to explain why they left Ubuntu behind as I did (snaps). No confusion, just a reiteration of disappointment that they went from being my favorite distro to completely off my list with the snap stuff.
Exactly. I hope pop moves away from ubuntu at some point though.
Nix, guix, flatpak, and OSI images are all better “universal” packages managers on shear technical merits while also not be a vendor locked proprietary solution.
Snaps are worse then what Redhat is doing.
Also than*
MR accepted. Thx!
Sheer* probably. Unless there a technical merit about cutting stuff.
Thx!
Np. We programmer types gotta help each other keep docs sharp ;)
