Applications like Firefox, IntelliJ, Chromium, etc. shouldn't be tied to system dependencies managed by apt. They should be entirely monolithic and hermetic.
Long term this deb vs snap approach will make sense and be good for Desktop Linux.
Is snap enough of improvement of Flakpak to ignore community standard and deal witb all the user hostile craziness like non-removable updater? No way.
I hope it goes the way of the Mir and upstart - replaced with a competitor and silently removed.
And I think that it's a grand time to slowly wind down snaps and switch to flatpak. Linux ecosystem does not need more fragmentation, and given proprietary nature of snap store, there is approximately 0% chance that anyone except Ubuntu derivatives would adopt it.
Maybe snap was better than Flatpak back in the beginning; I can easily believe that when the snaps were introduced, they were better than flatpaks. I am not going to judge. All I want to see a right decision made going forward.
No. When we have flatpak and appimage, snap makes zero sense. I just see it as a way to implement a centralized walled garden into the OS, and don't install Ubuntu systems even in VMs for five minute test drives.
The way Canonical rolled it out is flat out insulting to the free software community and distro culture, IMHO.
It's too late here to write about its technical problems, so I'll leave it at that.
Snap is immature, and not ready for production deployment. The way Ubuntu/parent company have pushed snap has been damaging to its image.
There's a particular irony to this statement. Before adopting Wayland, Canonical tried to do their own thing with Mir[1]. Years later they gave up and reluctantly adopted Wayland. Their investment in Snap rhymes with this. Snap is an inferior competitor to Flatpak, and in the end it's likely the dust will settle for Snap the same way it did for Mir—in the dirt.
Canoncial as an organization has some serious NIH syndrome and they are putting "Linux on the Desktop" through a lot of unnecessary pain.
AFAICT, Snap is a pretty good solution for server side apps. This is pure speculation (and I don't even know if the timelines line up), but I suspect Canonical developed Snap for server apps, but something made it economically non viable (maybe the popularity of Docker?) and so they now needed to generate money through it some other way and they decided to do it by using it as a workstation app distribution mechanism, and by locking it down for enterprise.
So, flatpak will win, after years of Canonical messing about with snaps?
My Debian installation regularly has two or three versions of the same library (e.g. libx264) installed while packages update and start to use newer versions of the same library.
[0]: https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Program-Library-HOWTO/shared-librarie...
Trying to make a set of applications can't interact on an (desktop) environment which built on the promise of cooperation and inter-application communication is backwards from my perspective.
I understand that the browser is a significant vector for attacks, but there are other and more elegant ways to counter these attacks, and these can be layered from application itself to kernel and to hardware. This layered approach is more integrated, universal and applicable to a broader surface area in the OS and application stack.
<rant> Romanticizing isolation and immutability, trying to apply it everywhere in the software stack is a big step backwards in usability and productivity. These technologies are useful in some (and mostly in) server/service scenarios. Trying to apply these principles to everywhere is akin to only having a hammer and seeing everything as a nail. Just because they're easy, they're not the correct and best solution for anything and everything. Maybe we shouldn't be that lazy and try to create more useful and transparent user sandboxes built on cgroups, SELinux and AppArmor, and works with the package managers or traditional distro layouts seamlessly. </rant>I remember seeing it demoed at Canonical in 2015 or so. It’s been 7 years. How much longer should we wait?
That comparison is not helping to sell it.
How much time? We've been waiting for over 10 years for the dust to settle with Wayland.