A new ‘app store’ is expected to ship as part of Ubuntu 23.10 when it’s released in October — and it’ll debut with a notable change to DEB support.
Why is Ubuntu pushing snaps so hard? Is there objectively a benefit to them apart from Flatpak?
It seems like an odd hill to die on.
Canonical is just weird like that, it seems. They tend to pick something and fixate on it really hard (Eg. Unity desktop, Mir, that convergent phone thing, now Snaps) and work on it until it’s almost really good, then they get fixated on the next shiny thing and dump whatever they were doing to go chase that instead.
They’re the Google of Linux.
There’s a benefit to Canonical, the corp that maintains Ubuntu, which is that while snaps are open source tech, the server for the snap store is closed source and snap can’t be configured to point at another store.
In other words, it’s about centralized control.
There are some advantages to the tech itself, like live auto-updating, which is good for security-critical server apps, but over all I’m not a fan.
I don’t think that the board members are sitting there and pondering how they can exercise more control on the user via snaps.
The auto updating is a nice benefit but it doesn’t seem like a big enough benefit to allocate so many developer man hours into. I would think that Canonical would realize that the developers time is better spent making features the users want.
But what do I know? I’m just someone posting on Lemmy not a Canonical board member haha
It could be like the old RPM vs DEB arguments. Technically, one could have argued at the time that RPM was explicitly singled out in the Linux Standard base.
However, these days, DEB certainly feels more common (although, from my understanding, Redhat/Slack is big in enterprise, so i’m not actually sure which is more common).
Except both RPM and DEB are fully open-source. Flatpak is open-source, Snap is partly proprietary.
Tldr: the new store only supports snaps, deb support will come later. OP, please provide summary next time if you link to clickbait articles.
Deb support will come later, but:
If the same piece of software exists in the Ubuntu repository and the snap store the new store will only make it possible to install the snap version.
So the title is on point IMO.
Ok, note taken 👍
Or this time as both title and summary can be edited.
Time to change distro.
I’m kinda baffled people would jump ship because of this matter
Snaps have been a thing for 7 years and before that Canonical did similar really weird things (Amazon shopping lense a decade ago anyone?)anyone who really cares already uses something else
This is why im on the hunt for a new distro. Looking at pop and fedora right now. Kinda prefer deb cause thats been my env for 15 yrs
I would recommend using Linux Mint. It is Ubuntu without Gnome Shell and snaps. They use Flatpak instead. I have been enjoying it ever since I jumped ship from Ubuntu about 2 years ago.
