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Comment by geodel | Hacker News Reader

I think in case of Snap, it is part of money making server business. So it is less likely Canonical is going to give up on that.

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(Disclaimer: I don't work for Canonical, I just use Ubuntu for my work.) I think it will end up like so:

* apt/dpkg will remain the base packaging software on desktop and server. They're well-tested and familiar.

* flatpak will become the primary format for installing desktop software outside of repo. This'll be nice for some large open-source projects that cause grief for distro packagers, and will also give companies a single target for major Linux desktops. Flatpak is too narrowly-targeted to replace snap in all cases snap was designed for.

* snap will become a mechanism for image-based application deployment, primarily IoT.

* docker/lxd/whatever will be used to target immutable deployments, primarily servers.

But then you're competing with Docker images. Not that Docker is that amazing, but I just don't see why anyone would want to use Snap instead of Docker?

Containers are for a completely different use case than system packages.

CoreOS and RancherOS have shown how everything can either be built into the base OS image or running in Docker, with no system packages needed.

I think this had been shown somewhat before the time of these whippersnapper distros (Slackware, LFS etc), indeed before the days of RPM, make && make install directly on production servers were how things were done.. and it was not good.

Also; in the case of CoreOS, the base image is still built using a package manager (portage). Not sure about that other guy.

I am not sure e.g. how docker image is better for openoffice or eclipse/intellij idea and so on for desktop. I think Snap fits usecase much better. May be multiple snaps combined to create a service/image for a server.

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