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by bayindirh 1547 days ago
Everybody I know strongly dislikes snap because of the machinery it brings and how untidy it is. Also it's forced upon the users.

AppImage and Flatpak are fine, and AppImage is the first choice amongst this "everything included" bundle formats.

However, Ubuntu is forcing snaps as a power move. Both the software, and the treatment from Canonical is off-putting a lot of enthusiasts right now.

1 comments

The devil on my shoulder wonders if Canonical's pushing of Snap, rather than adoption of FlatPak, is another instance of the Not-Invented-Here organizational dysfunction that led it to slog on with its own Bazaar SCM rather than switch to Git (or Mercurial).
Bazaar, Upstart, Mir, Snap. Canonical really likes to do their own thing and usually it fails in the end. Competing implementations are great but competing standards only make more work for everyone else.
The worst part is that they sabotage their good software by insisting on these bad solutions. LXD and MicroK8s for example, are distributed only as snaps - not even tarballs. LXD is actually a great software. But it's available as native package only on a few less popular distributions, and that has hurt its adoption. I wanted to try MicroK8s, but completely abandoned it due to the snap requirement.
Snap server is closed-source (unless anything has changed?), so I believe this is more likely to be a nefarious intent to create a dependency on their service (which Canonical can monetize later) than a mere dysfunction