| > The backend is proprietary. GitHub is proprietary. I understand that some people don't accept that either. But if you accept and use GitHub, then you should have no problem with snaps on this basis. Also, on this topic, consider this quote[1]: "We did that experiment with Launchpad; the people who said they wouldn’t use it because it wasn’t open source were the same people promoting a closed source alternative. When we open sourced Launchpad, they said that they wouldn’t use it anyway because Canonical was the primary contributor." I am not saying that Flatpak is proprietary. I am saying that the focus on the backend not having source available is specious. > Developer controls the updates. Users CAN defer updates (eg. because they're on a metered connection, or they only want to update on Patch Tuesdays, or whatever). However, in the default arrangement they cannot defer them indefinitely. But in today's Internet-connected world, refusing updates forever is also anti-social and unacceptable, so I don't see a great loss there. However you can manually install a snap such that it never updates[2]. > APT does a fantastic job as it is. No, it doesn't. It is fantastic for distribution releases that don't change their dependency structure after release. It's terrible for shipping new software to an existing distribution release. This is seen both in packages that must have major updates frequently (eg. Firefox, which added a whole new Rust toolchain dependency that had to be backported into existing stable distribution releases). It's also seen in various third party apt repositories that ship software to users that break their systems by causing future upgrade issues because they mess with distribution-provided dependencies in a way that future distribution package updates do not know about. apt/deb also provides no application sandboxing for third party software that you might trust less than your distribution. If as a developer you've ever tried to ship software to users as deb/apt, you would know this. Complaints about it are all over the Internet and this has been the consensus for many years. > Don't shove it down our throats, make it optional at least. It already is optional. You can remove snapd and pin snapd in apt to a negative score to never have it installed again[3]. Chromium won't be available to you as a distribution-provided deb in Ubuntu 20.04 then, but nor is it in Mint. [1] https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/linux-mint-20-disables-deb2snap... [2] https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for... [3] http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/en/man5/apt_prefer... |
If you don't like the Snap Store, well, get coding and be prepared to fork the client also.