this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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What happened to Ubuntu?
It's popular and widely used so people naturally hate it.
and also snaps
Yes, snaps are widely used so naturally people hate them too.
Who uses snaps except Ubuntu crowd?!
I use snaps on multiple non-Ubuntu systems, because they provide capabilities I haven't been able to find elsewhere without having to manually manage updates, security issues, etc.
have you been payed by canonical to say that
No, I do that for free, because it's a net benefit to me.
Flatpak provides similar sandboxing capabilities and you can use TopGrade to manage all updates.
Flatpak doesn't manage system services.
Distrobox is a better fit for this meme. Without it, one needs to manually configure devices and namespaces. Which is not that difficult, but
distrobox createmakes it trivial.forcing snaps on people (if you apt-get firefox it'll install the snap even though you didn't install it with snap), adding ads for it, snap having a proprietary backend, snap being essentially just a fundamentally worse version of flatpak.
the only advantage i've heard for snap is that it's easier to package for.
Plus I think if you want the advantages of a stable release, easy for user, distro, they'll also need to be immutable now, what's the usecase for a non-immutable, stable, easy to use distro?
If you didn't care about ease of use, you wouldn't want immutable, but if you do, you absolutely do.
If you don't care about stability, you might not care about immutable, but if you do, you absolutely do.
Ubuntu seems like a prime usecase for an immutable distro, but it isn't for tradition-related reasons rather than it actually being good for users.
Snap is also useful for server software and it can apparently be used for more low level things such as drivers. Still, it being properiatary is enough for me to avoid it completely.
Ubuntu Core is the way Ubuntu's doing immutability. They've already got tech demos of Ubuntu Core Desktop, but designing a distro around interchangeable parts with immutability and the ability to have airgapped networks that can still get updates is a nontrivial task. But it depends on things that snaps can do that Flatpak was never designed to do.
Can you explain any of those things? I've never understood the appeal and was just kinda hoping they'd let snap die.
Ubuntu Core works by having everything on the system, kernel included, be a snap. Or, as another way of describing the same thing, everything on the system is installed by mounting a squashfs image (which by its nature is read-only) and applying groups to the processes in those images. This applies all the way down to the level of the kernel, although a kernel snap, on install or upgrade, does write out to a boot partition.
The net result is that you get many of the benefits of immutability, but also many of the benefits of traditional distros. For example, you can replace the kernel snap (and even build your own kernel snap if you choose) without replacing the rest of the base system, since the kernel is installed separately from the base. This is especially important for non-x86 systems that may need different (mutually incompatible) kernel builds for different SOCs, but even on x86 an example of replacing parts like that is NVIDIA drivers. But you don't need a separate version of cups just because you have an Nvidia GPU. And because cups is in its own snap, it's isolated too. You get the same benefits of confinement that applies to desktop apps, but for services, where it can be even stricter. After all, cups doesn't need to even know that you have a GPU, so an attack vector of hacking cups and then using it to attack your GPU gets foiled in a way that an immutable base with unconfined services doesn't.
And that's one of the annoying things about snap: It's fundamentally a nice system with neat capabilities but it's spoiled by Canonical's proprietary backend.
There was an open backend for a while. A complete lack of interest killed it.
that is very interesting, however, why can't that be done wth flatpak?
That's pretty fundamentally not how flatpak works. It could theoretically be modified to do all of that, but by that point you're recreating snapd and it would likely be easier and more straightforward to start with the current snapd and change what you dislike about it.
the problem with snap is that it's proprietary, which really can't be changed, and while i'm sure it would be a lot of work, what kind of work would need to be done, is really what i'm curious about.
https://github.com/canonical/snapd