There’s no Snap, which some will see as a win, but there is Flatpak

You heard it here first, folks! Uninstall Snap and install Flatpak to make your distro more like Windows!

Really? When did they make the switch?

Put them in a blender together and you’ll get one that lets in only the right folks and one that lets in only the wrong ones.

The initial comment said that they didn’t like that Ubuntu is owned by a company.

Content note: shilling

!https://frame.work/!<

Personally I have no issues with a corporate backed distro. My point is that if someone doesn’t want a corporate owned distro, PopOS doesn’t fit the bill.

• Warzone 2100
• OpenTTD
• 0 A.D.
• OpenRCT2

It may surprise you to see how many Debian contributors are doing so on Canonical’s payroll.

Isn’t Pop OS just System76’s spin on Ubuntu?

In Python it’s really hard!

def __eq__(self, other):
    ...

How do you even write those subscripted hyphens???

That link includes a whole lot of old things as well as blog posts about how they sped up the performance of the Firefox snap, after which there doesn’t seem to be much, if any, further evidence of the snap being slow.

The claim that snaps are a Canonical NIH thing is falsified by those two facts. Even if Canonical said “okay, we’ll distribute desktop apps with Flatpak,” that wouldn’t affect the vast majority of their ongoing effort for snaps, which are related to things that Flatpak simply doesn’t do. Instead, they’d have the separate work of making the moving target of flatpaks work with their snap-based systems such as Ubuntu Core while still having to fully maintain that snap based ecosystem for the enterprise customers who use it for things that Flatpak simply doesn’t do.

Good thing grep exists!

I don’t like snaps because it’s just another Canonical NIH thing. Everyone else agreed on flatpak which seems to have a good design with portals and all and being fully open.

Snaps both predate flatpak and do things that Flatpaks are not designed to do.

Canonical have also been a part of the desktop portals standard for a very long time, as they’ve been a part of how snaps do things.

Are they though? They were at one point, but even then I’ve not seen comparative slowness compared to the equivalent Flatpaks. In some cases I’ve seen them be slow compared to native packages, but even that seems to have all but disappeared for me.

Flatpak has long had the ability to dump the contents of a snap into it, because snaps had already solved many of the build issues flatpaks were struggling with and they used similar runtimes for their sandboxing. It’s also a convenient way to convert apps over, since many apps got packaged as snaps before flatpak was really usable.

It depends what you’re trying to accomplish. For me, having the ability to essentially use Lego to put together my system is one of the great features of both snap and nix that Flatpak doesn’t cover.

There are plenty of use cases that snap provides that flatpak doesn’t - they only compete in a subset of snap’s functionality. For example, flatpak does not (and is not designed to) provide a way to use it to distribute kernels or system services.

That is the behaviour that’s built for when an upgrade through a “classic” package manager (e.g. apt, dnf) updates Firefox while it’s still running. The only way I can think of that you’d get that with a snap is if you’re intentionally bypassing the confinement (e.g. by running /snap/firefox/current/usr/lib/firefox/firefox directly, which can also massively mess with other things since Firefox won’t be running in the core22 environment it expects).

If you’re using the snap as expected (e.g. opening the .desktop file in /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/, running /snap/bin/firefox or running snap run firefox), snapd won’t replace /snap/firefox/current until you no longer have any processes from that snap running. Instead you’ll get a desktop notification to close and restart Firefox to update it, and two weeks to either do so or to run snap refresh --hold firefox to prevent the update (or something like snap refresh --hold=6w firefox to hold the refresh for 6 weeks). Depending on what graphical updater you have, you may also have the ability to hold the update through that updater.

Are you sure you’re running the Firefox snap? Because that sounds pretty much precisely like the expected behaviour if someone had gone to lengths to avoid using the snap.

I met Soumyadeep at this year’s Ubuntu Summit. Really nice guy, very excited about what he’s doing.