[matthewbauer]

I really don't see the use case at all for Snappy. I mean FlatPak makes sense for devs who want to "package- once, run everywhere", but Snappy is Ubuntu-only. The thing is Ubuntu through Debian is really good at having lots of up-to-date packages. Why abandon that for some crummy app store?

[Izkata]

A month or two ago I went digging because I wanted to disable auto-update for something I installed through snap (it stores configuration inside the versioned directory, so one day everything was just gone because snap auto-upgraded it the night before). Completely disabling auto-update is apparently not possible, and by design.

According to the devs involved, on mailing lists and bug reports, the point of snap over apt/etc is the auto updates can't be disabled, so end-users can't put off or forget about security updates. Even adding a way to delay or configure when an update happens seemed to take a lot of convincing before it was added.

(In the end I just disabled the snap service entirely to stop auto-updates. Only downside seems to be that I can't query or install new things through snap without it.)

[evand]

The "Users by distribution" table at the bottom of the Spotify page is worth a look: https://snapcraft.io/spotify

Snaps are not Ubuntu-only. You can find install instructions for many distros here: https://docs.snapcraft.io/core/install

[alsadi]

Snap is a proprietary format that is canonical-centric, don't tell me that the community make choice to make client opensource but official store both hardcoded (initially) and closed source.

On the other hand,flatpak is a freedesktop project, done using open standards like OCI and ostree.

[popey]

No. Snap is not a proprietary format at all. It's a squashfs file with a small amount of metadata. You can make a snap by plopping a file in a folder, add a simple snap.yaml which describes the application and then "make" a snap with the common mksquashfs tool.

There is room in the world for flatpak and snap to co-exist. We created snaps as an evolution on from clicks on the Ubuntu phone, and it covers use cases that flatpak wasn't designed for.

[alsadi]

Remember ubuntu one storage solution? An opensource client does not make the whole thing free software and open standard.

[matthewbauer]

Thanks I did not realize it was cross platform. It still disregards too many free desktop standards for me however. Feels like Unity when it comes to Canonical’s NIH syndrome.