• Rustmilian@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    It’s not that successful if the userbase hates it and would rather use a competitor.

      • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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        5 months ago

        Yeah I love it, Debian feels like opening a featureless gray box that just says “OS” on the front. Add whatever you want. A blank canvas. It’s as close to “generic” Linux as you can get.

      • Whayle@kbin.social
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        5 months ago

        I installed mint on my second PC, and it’s great. I feel like migrating my main, but I’m not sure it would go smoothly. I’ve had a lot of issues with my four months old Ubuntu install, lately the keyboard is nonfunctional at the login screen about half the time. Snaps are another reason making me want to leave it behind.

        • Zink@programming.dev
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          5 months ago

          I found out I could dual boot Linux at work and went right for Mint. I think it’s great. It’s a nice pragmatic choice for people like me who love using Linux and are constantly in a bash prompt, but who don’t want to build up a system from scratch and who are fine not running the very latest.

          It’s even downstream from some of the most popular distros out there, but without Canonical’s controversial shit.

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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    5 months ago

    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)

    • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      So I didn’t realize that the snaps logo is an origami bird.

      “It was like a piece of self-opening origami, or a rosebud blooming into a rose in just a few seconds. Where just a few moments earlier there had been a smoothly curved black disk, there was now a bird. A bird, hovering there.” - Douglas Adams, describing the Hitchhiker’s Guide, Mk. II, from Mostly Harmless.

      A bit on the nose there, Canonical.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      The other day I tested Ubuntu just to see if it had gotten any better. It has become worse.

  • rtxn@lemmy.worldM
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      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

    • tsugu@slrpnk.netOP
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      5 months ago

      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.

      • rtxn@lemmy.worldM
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        5 months ago

        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.

        If the numbers were favorable, Canonical would release them.

        • tsugu@slrpnk.netOP
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          5 months ago

          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.

          • rtxn@lemmy.worldM
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            5 months ago

            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.

            • Rustmilian@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              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.

  • hperrin@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • TheFrirish@jlai.lu
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      5 months ago

      Correct me if I’m wrong but Ubuntu is the mostly used Linux desktop OS out there so I wouldn’t call it unsuccessful.

      Edit : I’m an idiot I can’t read snaps are not successful Ubuntu is

  • gencha@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    If you don’t like snaps, don’t use the distribution by the company who tries to establish them.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I agree, have seen so many people trying to document how to “desnap” Ubuntu and wondered why bother, you are fighting against what is now the whole point of Ubuntu while 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.

  • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works
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    5 months ago

    Nix, guix, flatpak, and OSI images are all better “universal” packages managers on sheer technical merits while also not be a vendor locked proprietary solution.

    Snaps are worse than what Redhat is doing.

  • алсааас [she/they]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 months ago

    snaps are a proprietary vendor-locked format, the only redeeming quality is being able to run them in cli (once Flatpak get that too, there is no valid reason for snaps to exist).

    I just find it midly infuriating (if that even is a thing, meaning I hate it but it’s not that significant for me to distro hop on my work laptop) to have two “universal” package formats on my system with Canonical shoving the objectively worse one (from a free/libre pov) down my throat…

  • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      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.

      • hperrin@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        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 /home directory, and there’s no way to fix that except changing the source code and recompiling it.

    • Petter1@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      I’d bet most ubuntu user don’t know the difference between snap and deb, tho.

      • Captain Janeway@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I didn’t until apps started breaking. The snap version of steam, Firefox, and Unity (I think?) all started to have issues. When I googled around people would often ask “deb or snap”? I uninstalled the snap packages and installed the deb packages and most of my issues went away.

        I ultimately switched to Linux Mint because I kept having stability issues and I was just desperate for a solution. But snap was not a great experience for me.

        • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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          5 months ago

          It would of been a little less bad if they hadn’t forced it on everyone over night. It also didn’t help that it had a ton of complexity and overhead.

          I didn’t use Flatpak for the longest time as I was scared from years prior.

      • smeg@feddit.uk
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        5 months ago

        Exactly, wouldn’t most of the people who really care already have moved on from Ubuntu?