linuxmemes

Depending on the mechanism it may not be so bad.

it seems weird to attack Canonical so much over it.

I mean, on the technical side, sure. Canonical's technical choice is just weird. Plenty of fully open app store environments have almost no competition, because self hosting is still hard work.

But all of the business reasons - for having a closed proprietary sole app server - go against everything that Canonical used to claim they stood for.

Canonical's business choice not to open source the snap servers is an open declaration of war against the FOSS community who have previously rallied around them.

It's like inviting someone into my basement and locking the door with a key as they get to the bottom step. The action isn't illegal, but the probable motive is creepy as fuck. (Maybe I just watch too many horror movies. Lol.)

It's also inaccurate to say that they reinvented the wheel since snaps predate flatpaks.

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.

A "server" is just a remote computer "serving" you stuff, after all. Although, if you have stuff you would have trouble setting up again from scratch, I'd recommend you look into making at least these parts of your setup repeatable, be it something fancy ala Ansible, or even just a couple of bash scripts to install the correct packages and backing up your configs.

Once you're in this mindset and take this approach by default, changing machines becomes a lot less daunting in general. A new personal machine takes me about an hour to setup, preparing the USB included.

If it's stuff you don't care about losing, ignore everything I just said. But if you do care about it, I'd slowly start by giving from the most to least critical parts. There's no better time to do it than when things are working well haha!

I run 3d printer management software on an old Dell server using desktop ubuntu. Works just fine. I made a second user account that hosts a minecraft server, and a third user account that runs a steam account to host a 7 days to die server. I really wanted to get into administering my own home lab, but I'm just too casual and there is not enough time in the day for me to do all of my hobbies. I can remote in and see a GUI, easy day.

It's how we do.

Old software (compared to leading or bleeding edge distros), Canonical (the company owning ubuntu) has many controversies surrounding it, snaps (sandbox packaging mode) are problematic in multiple regards etc…

Try fedora before switching entirely to ubuntu. It’s still owned by a company (itself owned by IBM), however it is (at least a bit) better than canonical.

Ubuntu is fine if you install Flatpak and replace the Ubuntu Software Center with the Gnome Software Center, but that is not something that is obvious or even easy for a newcomer, so in that regard, it is atrocious.