I know this thread is likely to quickly descend into 50 variants of “ew, snap”, but it’s a good write up of what is really a pretty interesting novel approach to the immutable desktop world.
As the article says, it could well be the thing that actually justifies Canonical’s dogged perseverance with snaps in the first place.
I appreciate that they try, and as much as I dislike some of snap’s design choices I think it has a place. Flatpak appears to be the winner in this race however, and I feel like this is Unity all over. Just as the project gets good they abandon it for the prevailing winds. I’ve been told the snap server isn’t open source, which is a big concern?
Snap’s problem is kind of two-fold. One the one hand they keep their server closed source, because it’s heavily integrated into Canonical’s business infrastructure, and on the other hand they’re trying to use the Snap store as a way to make money through business customers. One of those ways is that if you want to publish a snap for your company or your personal devices, you have to either make it publicly available for everyone, or pay Canonical a metric fuckton of money to add your own “store” within the Snap store.
There are tons of free projects with open source clients and closed source servers (often with open implementations available), but the combination of “monetisation platform” and swapping out non-snap system components for snap components (i.e. Firefox, Chromium, LXC) really pisses off a lot of people.
I’m sure the patch to allow Snap to be reconfigured to use an alternative source URL from a config file somewhere is easy to add, but the problem is more with the intention to keep it the way it is.
One annoying example of Canonical’s unwillingness to adjust is the snap folder in your home directory. That’s snap, not Snap. All directories start with a capital letter, but not snap, and there’s no way to change it. You can’t add a period in front of the name to hide it, you can’t fix the capitalisation, you can’t move it to another location, you have to accept its location and name or remove snap entirely.
The client and most of Ubuntu is all open source so there’s absolutely no reason why someone wouldn’t be able to fix this, but Snap is full of such small and needlessly user-hostile limitations that don’t make a lot of sense and have often been fixed by Flatpak already. I know Flatpak can’t do some of the things Snap does, but I question how relevant use cases are for the complicated system interactions that make some of the more advanced Snap features available when looking at desktop users. Put this stuff in Ubuntu IoT and Ubuntu Core, that’s where it makes total sense, maybe even Ubuntu Server, but why stuff Ubuntu Desktop full of it?
Unlike desktop environments where there were equivalent alternatives to Unity, Flatpak isn’t an alternative to Snap that can deliver an equivalent solution. You can’t build an OS on top of Flatpak. This is why I think that if Snap makes the lives of Canonical developers easier, they’ll keep maintaining it. We’ll know if Ubuntu Core Desktop becomes a mainstream flavor or the default one. I think there is a commercial value of it in the enterprise world where tight control of the OS and upgrade robustness are needed. In this kind of a future Snap will have a long and productive life. If it ends up being used only for desktop apps which Flatpak covers, it may fall by the wayside as you suggested.
Absolutely, and I think that’s why snap has a future at all. Immutability is the future, as well as self-contained apps. We saw the explosive growth of Docker as indication that this was the way. If they can make their tooling as easy as a Dockerfile they will win just by reducing the work needed to support it.
I’m pretty excited about it. It’s a much cleaner solution to the problem immutable OSes are trying to solve. Dare I say it’s better even than the Android model because it covers the whole stack with a single system.
I don’t like Canonical pushing snaps as universal apps for all distros, because of issues like sandboxing not working on mainline kernels.
But it’s pretty interesting to see how a fully snap based desktop OS could look like. It might have less limitations than rpm-ostree. Easy access to recent mesa and similar would be awesome.
I actually don’t understand the issue people have with Snaps. The main gripe seems to be “It’s controlled by Canonical”.
But why is it an issue that Canonical controls a source of software for their own OS? Isn’t that the same with every distro’s repository?But why is it an issue that Canonical controls a source of software for their own OS? Isn’t that the same with every distro’s repository?
No. You can add any other repository to apt, rpm, Flatpak, etc. You cannot do the same with Snap and that’s by design. Canonical wants to be the sole gatekeeper of Linux software, hoping that all developers have no alternative but to publish software on the Snap store (ideally only there) which works best on Ubuntu.
Therefore: Fuck Snap.
Exactly. I feel they want to sell it to a big player, but no big player will touch it unless they can fully control it. Hence snap as part of that plan. Ubuntu is a hell no for me.
Forget selling it.
I think they’re going to get everyone trapped in the ecosystem, and then they’ll start charging for access to the source.@caseyweederman @makingStuffForFun the prediction imperative will come in before that. surveillance capitalism is how they will make their fortune
How would they trap everyone in the ecosystem?
This isn’t Apple, there’s a gajillon other ways of getting software you can use on every single linux distro.That’s exactly what they’re trying to change.
Then I guess it’s a good thing they don’t control all other Linux distros.
You cannot do the same with Snap and that’s by design. Canonical wants to be the sole gatekeeper of Linux software
Then why did they publish source code and documentation for all parts of it, so you can create your own snap store?
Smoke and mirrors. You cannot add a secondary Snap repository.
You can; the issue is that you can’t add two snap repositories at once.
This is functionally pretty much the same thing, as nobody is likely to want to use snap while locking themselves out of the main snap repository, but it’s still important to make the distinction.
In theory I guess there’s nothing stopping you setting up a mirror of the main snap repo with automatic package scraping, but nobody’s really bothered exploring it seeing as no distro other than Ubuntu has taken any interest in running snap.
I know that it’s possible to change the one entry but adding additional ones is not possible and that’s by design.
Is that an artificial limitation that could be resolved by third-party clients?
From reading this that’s not the whole story. Someone working at canonical successfully made a version of snap that could use alternative stores, but the default version does not allow it
And honestly at the point of installing that modified version you may as well just install a different package manager anyway
Or better yet, a different OS.
Might I suggest NixOS best package manager out there imo
Snap makes a lot of sense for desktop apps in my opinion. There’s a conceptual difference between system level packages that you install using something like APT, and applications. Applications should be managed at the user layer while the base system should provide all the common libraries and APIs.
It’s also worth noting that this is a similar approach to what MacOS has been doing for ages with .app bundles where any shared libraries and assets are packaged together in the app folder. The approach addresses a lot of the issues you see with shared libraries such as having two different apps that want different versions of a particular library.
The trade off is that you end up using a bit more disk space and memory, but it’s so negligible that the benefits of having apps being self-contained far outweigh these downsides.
The problem here is that for that purpose, Flatpak is better in nearly every way and is far more universal
I think Snap makes the most sense for something like Ubuntu Core, where it has the unique benefit of being able to provide lower level system components (as opposed to Flatpak which is more or less just for desktop GUI apps), but it doesn’t make sense for much else over other existing solutions
I don’t disagree, but as you point out in the context of Ubuntu Core the decision makes sense and snap does the job.
This new entrant in the immutable space is not a replacement for ordinary Ubuntu
Not yet the replacement. It will be and I bet Canonical is targeting 26.04 LTS to do that. This is just the next step of trying to force all their users into Snap, just like when Flatpak was banned from being in by default of community-supported but official Ubuntu variants such as Xubuntu.
I’m very excited about how the Linux community generally seems to be moving towards various approaches to immutable systems - all of them having in common that system updates are going to be a lot less likely to break. The future is looking good!
As long as we don’t end up with Linux systems designed like Android.
If anyone would lock their OS down like that, it would be Canonical.
“like android/ios” is the ultimate goal of these systems lol
“like Android/ios”
is pretty vague. Do you mean locked down, with features like SafetyNet which locks people in to Google Services? Or do you mean locked down in the sense that installing packages doesn’t just directly change the files in / ?
Systems like rpm-ostree still allow modifications to the OS, it just requires other steps. OpenSUSE MicroOS even allows for arbitrary modifications to the root fs through transactional-update (it even allows for dropping in to a transactional-update shell, so it’s not necessary to prefix each command with transactional-update).
Especially OpenSUSE MicroOS feels more like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, compared to Fedora rpm-ostree’s limitations compared to Fedora dnf.
Using Fedora Silverblue has gone a long way to dispel that concern for me. It goes out of its way to be much more user-centric than that. I can’t speak for the others yet.
Having distro maintainers decide a rigid partition structure for you would be a really bad approach, so I really hope not.
Yes except it’s all open source and if you’re unhappy you can fork. Good luck forking iOS.
As much as I have issues with the snap implementation, I really want to live in a world where my base os is solid and everything else is easily updatable. LTS, with the latest apps.
Snap and flatpak achieve this, and I want more of that. Just less… frustrating. And less not-invented-here like.
And less not-invented-here like.
The only party playing that game is Canonical. Everybody else already agreed on Flatpak.
Flatpak cannot do what’s discussed in the article. Snap can and it was started prior to Flatpak. If Flatpak was able to do what Snap can, you’d have half a point.
Flatpak cannot do what’s discussed in the article.
Nobody claimed 100% feature overlap. For regular GUI applications both work relatively similar, to the point that Snap now happily uses technologies developed for Flatpak, such as Portals.
it was started prior to Flatpak.
That’s irrelevant. One could just as well argue that Flatpak evolved from developments (OSTree, etc.) that are even older but that beside the point. Fact is that OSTree and Flatpak are vendor neutral and Snap isn’t. Attempts at vendor lock-in caused Valve leave Ubuntu and later choose Flatpak on SteamOS.
Snap has the ability to do the base system in a much more modular way and could be really cool for an immutable system. Forcing them on desktop users with their transitional deb packages and making it heavily integrated with only one repository really screwed it up.
Also I’m not sure about slow startup times. Are those still an issue? If so, then I would be sure to considet Ubuntu dead and not only not recommend it but actively recommend switching away from it.
Yes, they are still an issue. It is irritating enough that I have currently zero snaps and would rather build from source if snap is the only binary option.
That’s basically THE dealbreaker for snaps. Loop devices on lsblk? Most people don’t care and wouldn’t see it. Proprietary backend? Again, most regular people (Ubuntu’s target audience) do not care. So the slow startup time is THE dealbreaker.
Fedora Silverblue sounds like it fits what you’re looking for.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Ordinary desktop and server Ubuntu aren’t going anywhere, and the next release, numbered 24.04 and codenamed Noble Numbat as we mentioned last month, will be the default and come with all the usual editions and flavors.
Nor is this a whole new product: it is a graphical desktop edition of the existing Ubuntu Core distro, as we examined on its release in June last year, a couple of months after 22.04.
Ubuntu Core is Canonical’s Internet of Things (IoT) distro, intended to be embedded on edge devices, such as digital signs and smart displays.
Most of the major Linux vendors have immutable offerings, and The Reg has looked at several over the years, including MicroOS, the basis of SUSE’s next-gen enterprise OS ALP.
Former Canonical staffer Alan Pope demonstrated a Steam Deck running Ubuntu Core at the event, and his lengthy blog post about the experience contains some interesting details about how well the developer preview already works.
Compression of Flatpak apps is a key reason that Fedora now uses Btrfs, although it’s worth noting that, as of yet, Snap doesn’t include any form of deduplication between separate packages.
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