[sleavey]

As someone who hasn't yet used Ubuntu 18.04, is the snap store something I'll be using in 5 years time instead of APT, is it just another attempt by Canonical to jump on the app store bandwagon, or is it something completely different?

Excuse my ignorance but I'm intensely suspicious of "stores" on open source operating systems.

[Sylos]

You might be using it instead of APT for some things, but it won't replace APT.

Say you want the newest version of LibreOffice for whatever reason. This is a typical use-case where Snaps will come in handy. They have most dependencies bundled into the application, so you don't have to worry about your whole system getting wonky by installing newer versions of those dependencies to go with the newer version of the application.

This is also meant to serve as a way for devs to release software without much hassle. So, they don't have to open-source their code, hope that someone finds it, packages it for Ubuntu and in like five years time is available to end-users through the repositories.

They also don't have to worry about building a .deb, .rpm, Arch's format and whatever else there is, including accounting for the differences between distros. So, Snaps are supposed to work on all distros the same.

Ultimately, this will bring in more proprietary applications.

Well, and Snaps are sandboxed, so there's some protection, which makes those proprietary applications somewhat more acceptable, but as this piece of news shows, it's not complete protection.

Is it another attempt of Canonical to jump on the app store bandwagon? Most definitely yes. There's a competing format, Flatpak, which does pretty much the same, also AppImage which is somewhat older and without sandboxing, and Canonical is mainly just pushing their own format, because they'll have control of the store behind it.

Like, it's not impossible to hook up other Snap stores, but Canonical has established their infrastructure as the primary source and then how many users are going to look elsewhere?

[sleavey]

Thanks for the info. I like that Canonical are trying to solve the problems with package managers, but it's a shame we can't focus on making APT and friends more capable of the positive parts of app stores without bundling things into binaries akin to Windows executables. Allow multiple versions of libraries able to be installed, provide path translation (so systems that store binaries in /opt and others in /usr can still work from the same .deb file) and make sure repositories are more frequently updated. This might require Ubuntu to move to a rolling release, at least for some of their products (maybe they could keep releasing LTS versions every two years but have a rolling release for everything else). Sandboxing is arguably nothing to do with the package manager or app store - it's the kernel's problem. And bundling dependencies together is bad for security - critical vulnerabilities (recent example being in SSH) would not be able to be patched with one update, leaving unmaintained code that bundled a vulnerable dependency permanently flawed.

I think I'll wait for this most recent example of the trend to make everything into an app to blow over...