| Agree. And want to add one point which people seem to ignore in discussion like this. >> needing a newer version of a package because the older one flat out doesn't work for me The reverse situation is also a problem. For me personally, even a bigger problem. Imagine, you're happy with a supported Ubuntu LTS version and don't want to upgrade to a non-LTS version. If there's a new version of this one package you would really like to use that targets a newer version of Ubuntu, you're out of luck, basically. For example, maybe KDevelop replaced its home-grown C++ parsing engine with libclang. It's a huge change, you'd really like to give it a shot. Well, the only option is to upgrade to a newer version of Ubuntu. Yes, there may be a PPA that has the new KDevelop targeting your LTS version. But there's an equal chance such a PPA doesn't exist. Or it has pretty much the whole set of KDE libs as its dependencies; those will not only pollute your system but also can mess up your KDE installation. Also an anonymous person made the PPA and you decide to trust them at your own risk. And when you're finally ready to upgrade, you'll have to re-add PPAs manually. Etc, etc, etc. Snap solves both problems rather well. And in contrast to flatpak, there're official builds of VSCode and JetBrainds IDEs in the snap store. Maybe other software too -- didn't really look it up. One problem with snap is forced updates, of course. Ubuntu developers really need to add an option to disable them. |
I honestly don't know enough about Snap or Flatpak to really comment on them and their advantages and disadvantages. I've always shied away from them because I can't shake Xzibit in my head, "Yo dawg, I heard you like package managers so we put a package manager in your package manager!"