I’ve gathered that a lot of people in the nix space seem to dislike snaps but otherwise like Flatpaks, what seems to be the difference here?
Are Snaps just a lot slower than flatpaks or something? They’re both a bit bloaty as far as I know but makes Canonicals attempt worse?
Personally I think for home users or niche there should be a snap less variant of this distribution with all the bells and whistles.
Sure it might be pointless, but you could argue that for dozens of other distros that take Debian, Fedora or Arch stuff and make it as their own variant, I.e MX Linux or Manjaro.
What are your thoughts?
The server is proprietary and last I checked you can’t even turn off auto-updating or verify the binaries they push to you.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-mint-dumps-ubuntu-snap/
In the Ubuntu 20.04 package base, the Chromium package is indeed empty and acting, without your consent, as a backdoor by connecting your computer to the Ubuntu Store. Applications in this store cannot be patched, or pinned. You can’t audit them, hold them, modify them, or even point Snap to a different store. You’ve as much empowerment with this as if you were using proprietary software, i.e. none. This is in effect similar to a commercial proprietary solution, but with two major differences: It runs as root, and it installs itself without asking you.
This is why I don’t love snaps, proprietary backend. I think snaps actually work great for the most part, and flatpaks don’t support cli apps, only GUI.
I don’t know why people keep saying that flatpaks don’t support cli apps. They do. I know it’s awkward to type out
flatpak run io.github.zyedidia.microor whatever every time you want to use a text editor, but aliases fix that pretty neatly, and that example wasn’t hypothetical.You don’t even need to create aliases yourself. Flatpak creates wrapper scripts for every app that you install. Just symlink them into your PATH.
ln -s /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin/org.example.CliTool ~/.local/bin/cli-toolor if you are using a user remote
ln -s ~/.local/share/flatpak/exports/bin/org.example.CliTool ~/.local/bin/cli-tool(Note: some lemmy clients render the the tilde in code blocks incorrectly)
What? I’ve used neovim flatpak without issues in Fedora and openSuse…
Research what happened to Upstart, Mir or Unity. It won’t take long until snap becomes one of them. Somebody at canonical seems to desperately obsess over having something unique, either as a way to justify canonicals existance or even in the hopes of making the next big thing. Over all these years they never learned that whatever they do exclusively will always fall short of any other joint efforts in the linux world, because they always lack the technical advances, ability/will to push it for a prolonged time and/or the non-proprietary-ness. So instead of collaborating like every serious linux vendor, they’re polluting their distro with half-assed, ever changing and unwanted experiments. They’re even hijacking apt commands to push their stupid snap stuff against the users intent. With the shengians they’re pulling Ubuntu cannot be relied on, and with that they’re sabotaging their own success and drive away any commercial customers that generate revenue.
Lets hope so
- proprietary server (snap store), unlike flatpak
- snapd only allows one server (but it is foss so you could just patch it), unlike flatpak
- nonexistent security on snap store, multiple times malware, unlike flatpak
- no sandboxing without apparmor and specific profiles, so not cross platform, unlike flatpak
- the system apps are also requiring apparmor, so not cross platform
- they lack granular permission systems afaik
- they concur with flatpak, which is horrible as we need a universal packaging format, not 3
- seemingly no reproducible builds?
- no separation between all, opensource, verified repo, unlike flatpak
And people complain abour resource usage etc, but that is just separating apps from the system. Flatpak does the same.
So they have GPL Violation’s?
You forgot also snaps pollute both the mount list and the path. Whether you like or dislike the second is up to opinion, but nobody likes the first.
I think the second point is the biggest for me: it’s almost like Canonical wanted to have a single dominant store for apps, as the ecosystem they are building supports only one. And, apparently, that one server is also closed?
So if you try to make an alternative source and give instructions to people how to configure their snap installation to use it (I found this information very hard to find for some reason…), your “store” probably won’t have the same packages Canonical’s has, so users won’t be able to find the packages and I imagine updates are also now broken?
Contrasting this with flatpak: you just install apps from wherever. Or from flathub. Or your own site. Doesn’t matter. No business incentive behind—built into the tools—to make everyone use flathub.org.
Yes, Flathub is important but there are many other repos. Nothing for non development though.
I maintain a hopefully complete list here
also how slow they are to launch
Not to mention the extremely complicated back end. Flatpak doesn’t need extra permissions because it is based on bubblewrap. Snap is doing its own thing which is incredibly complicated.
Personally I think for home users or niche there should be a snap less variant of this distribution with all the bells and whistles.
There is : Linux Mint
Pop OS too.
For me it is partially the way canonical pushes snaps and forces it on to users. More so they are slow and the proprietary back end is a huge downside. Some snaps are know broken and cause more harm then good like the steam snap for example. Steam actively discourages users from even using it.
Snaps are proprietary, flatpacks are not, is the long and short of it
The store is SaaS (service as a software substitute) and not necessary proprietary
They are not. But the store is proprietary and snapd doesnt allow other stores. You could patch snapd to allow other stores though and the format is open
Snaps are just as “open source” as “Office Open XML” (.docx, .pptx etc.) are open file formats.
If there isn’t a fully open source software stack, it isn’t really open source.
You can’t “just patch it” to make snap work with another store. Instead what you’ve done is invented an entirely different store, which you’re now going to have to maintain. It is never going to be upstreamed to Canonical. You are going to be in a perpetual tug-of-war with Canonical driving snap development towards their own needs and not your own.
I like snap. On Ubuntu, it does everything Flatpak does and it can also do system components. It’s a system that allows to build a complete OS with the benefits of Flatpak. It’s a fairly well designed system and it came earlier than Flatpak. It works well for Ubuntu and its developers. There’s a lot of misinformation around it and the wider community seems to have jumped on the Flatpak wagon. That means we’re unfortunately gonna get mixed classic-base (deb, rpm) with Flatpak apps OSes in the longer term, instead of full Snap OSes. That’s a lame compromise but it is what it is. Not the first time the Linux community chooses technically interior tech for ideological reasons. Ultimately we use other people’s labor so we get what they decide and that’s alright. Classic core plus Flatpak is still way better than the all-classic status quo so I ain’t mad.
I would hate snaps a lot less if Ubuntu just stopped trying to force me to use them.
I think most people hate Snaps because Ubuntu is replacing .deb packages with snaps with no user prompt and that is a cardinal sin in Linux against the freedom and power of the user. Being “bloated” can’t help either when package maintainers do all what they can to ship programs light and simple. So it goes against at least two Linux principles.
snapdeez nutsthey both suck.
I read a comment on Reddit a while back that pointed out how much of the open source community has no issue hosting projects on GitHub while also lampooning Snap for having a closed-source backend server. However, since Snap (and GitHub) are open source themselves, nothing is stopping curious and concerned users from auditing the codebase or hosting their own servers. I removed Snap from my Ubuntu installation and use Flatpak instead, but I do not hate Snap. And for what it’s worth, I always go for the native DEB when possible…
What? Github is not open source.
And plenty of people have issues with Github: https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/
their entire hosting site is, itself, proprietary and/or trade-secret software
I really think people get confused between Git, the open source application, and Github the non-open-source online code repository.
Part of the reason they probably think they are one and the same is how often Git is used in command line to clone a Github repository locally.
Gitlab is open source and self-hostable, to my knowledge.
I heard a good comparison on here a while ago: Github is to Git as Pornhub is to porn.
That was the point they were making. GitHub is to git as the snap store is to snap, albeit there are existing alternatives to GitHub.
So like… I understand the why behind flatpaks and snaps, but I’m an end-user, and more often than not they just make things more difficult, in my opinion.
They’re really great for server setups for sort of keeping each individual application from being able to deeply influence other applications or the root filesystem.
But this means if I installed the Spotify snap (at least when I last tried a few years ago) I had to jump through a bunch of hoops to get it to be able to access my media files where all my music was stored.
So like I said, great for out-of-the-box-server setups where the everything is a little separated from each other (kind of like Docker, from what I understand, but at the app-level? I could be wrong here.) because it helps default security settings and interactions from getting confusing quickly.
However, for your casual end-user, it can quickly become a confusing nightmare if you actually do need your applications more easily interacting with one another because you’re just trying to write an email.
Anyway, that’s my personal opinion: The reasons they exist server-side are pretty solid, but the reasons they exist on desktops for the end-user are less compelling and often result in user frustration.
They’re really great for server setups
Please don’t go anywhere near servers with either of those, that’s what docker and alternatives are for.
the reasons they exist on desktops for the end-user are less compelling and often result in user frustration.
Try running a stable distro without them. If you want a program not to be years out of date, and don’t want to compile everything manually, the only options are to use an alternative package manager (flatpak/snap/nix/etc.), distrobox, or appimage + some pm for updates.
However, for your casual end-user, it can quickly become a confusing nightmare
They’re a lifesaver for casual users, especially when they’re integrated into a gui (software centre and discovery for example). None of the other options are nearly as user friendly.
Permission issues are really rare and distro specific from my experience. Also there are tools like flatseal to make fixing them easier.
I’ve found the opposite as an end user with Flatpaks. It makes it easy to install an app on multiple devices with different Linux flavours and it’ll just work.
Even if you’re on a single device, if the app isn’t in your repo or the latest version is not available in the repo, then flatpak can be very convenient. Certainly easier than compiling from source.
It is secure in the sense that it runs in a sandboxed environment with its own libraries. The downside of that though is bloat as you will have duplicates of libraries you already have on your system downloaded for flatpak. That bloat diminishes to an extent the more apps you use as the apps will share and reuse the Flatpak downloaded libraries, but your first app could be 2gb just because of the libraries and dependencies.
That bloat also extends to memory - you might be running two copies of multiple libraries at a time - one for the native system and another for the Flatpak app.
So on the one side it’s convenient and allows distributions across all flavours of Linux, and it sandboxes apps which is potentially more secure but the downside is bloat, and resource use.
Ubuntu have gone too far with Snap, forcing it instead of providing native apps, and it’s proprietary. Flatpak is more open and an option for users rather than forced on them.
Thanks for the really good breakdown. I was familiar with the idea that flatpaks are more open and snaps are more proprietary, but I had less understanding of the details of how they’re sandboxed. Thanks again, I’m sure it will help others understand it better, too.
I use apt because I care about security
Sudo apt install Firefox
Ubuntu then installs the snap version.
Its been a while but the last time I was running ubuntu I ran into an infuriating issue related to snaps. To be fair I can’t remember the exact details and it was related to some web dev stuff. All I remember is that I quit Ubuntu for a while fighting with snaps for a day or two.
I got so mad at Ubuntu when it kept installing snaps instead of native packages. It pushed me over the edge when I learned that a bunch of CLI software was snap only.
