Do Ubuntu's Snap Deserve So Much Negativity?

33 thoughts on “Do Ubuntu's Snap Deserve So Much Negativity?”

• Watching this video on the firefox snap, on Xubuntu Cinnamon. I don't automatically distrust Ubuntu, so I don't have a problem with a few snaps on my system. I also use appimages and a couple of flatpaks. I prefer plain old deb packages. When I'm using Arch, I don't really use containerized apps. I like chaotic-aur.

• Unacceptable. (1) Too many devloops. (2) excessive use of disk. (3) hard coded proprietary back end. (4) Dep works just fine, don't legislate to everyone that they have to use snaps because there are people out there who won't update their systems. (5) Loss of transparency. I can easily download a 'dep' package — before I install it — to figure out what it's loading into my system, and what dependencies it specifies. I know that the libraries it uses are standard libraries that it isn't going to change. Snaps are opaque. It seems i can only view them after I've installed the snap, and that means whatever (potentially) nefarious code was packaged in it is now on my system and doing whatever it wants. (6) DId I mention TOO FREAKING MANY DEVLOOPS!?!?

  On the good side, there IS a way to disable snaps. I've done it. Baeldung has an article: How to Remove and Disable Snap.

  If it weren't for that, I would be changing my prefered OS right now.

• I run Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to Support the Adoption of Linux, and the more I've used it the more I really like it 😉

• Snap auto-updating is an absolute deal breaker for me.I will never use snaps again.

• I like snaps and I don't understand the people, who rant about it. Besides if an update of a snap causes problems, unlike apt, rpm and appimage or flatpak, you can roll back to the previous version within 1 second, that is why you see those loop drives. Just type "snap revert <snap-name>".

• Like snaps and hope to see a lot more, especially proprietary software. Once they discover that they make one package and it works in multiple Linux distros, things should be better for all of us. It is very hard to convince a Windows developer to pay attention to 97 distros each with 20 versions on the market, with 5000 different combinations of conflicting packages. Could be flatpak just as well, but as long as it is limited in the kind of apps it can distribute, it will always need a conplementary packaging system to cover that. Snap can do everything, from drivers, low level apps to a simple desktop app.

• The fact many developers are abandoning ship should tell you everything you need to know.

• We need a universal app store for apt, snap, flatpak, pamac, and appimages.

• I don't hate snaps, I think they are totally fine. I also don't mind Flatpaks, totally fine. I do actually love AppImages though…. I know where my programs are, easy to share anywhere, portable, super simple to "install" and have some of the same benefits of the other 2.

• Those are all solutions which are introducing more problems then they are solving. So thanks. But no thanks.

• If you don't like snaps, you should move away from Ubuntu. I did.

• in one video I saw that flatpaks were slower than snaps

• Can you please do an update on this 😊

• I only use a snap… if there is only the snap of a application

• My take as an enterprise developer that has pretty much been deploying apps as Docker containers the past several years is that all of these solutions are too little, too late. Most user "apps" have moved to the browser, and anything server-side is going to be packaged with Docker. For development, it's best to run in lxc system containers or VMs to avoid polluting the host, at which point ease of use matters more than being the optimal solution, since anything can be cleaned up with a snapshot or other tools.

  There are only a few use cases that really make sense to package natively for the host anymore. A big one is gaming, and Steam is the de facto package manager there.

  What's left? Office software? Video editing software? Maybe a media player? That's just not enough to really fret over the best packaging solution. If that's all there ever was, the old-school apt and yum solutions would have been sufficient, and people never would have complained about messy packaging. The problem was always because people were running GUI apps, databases, IDEs, random collections of desktop environment components, chat apps, games, 5 different compiler toolchains, 10 different language runtimes, browser plugins for Java and Flash, CLI tools, etc. all on the host, and then you would get crazy conflicts. Those days are gone.

  Nowadays, I'm down to a single Windows laptop running a headless server Linux VM with all my development stuff in various lxc and Docker containers. Most of my games and GUI apps run fine in Windows as they always did. For the Linux stuff, I just pick whichever packaging solution looks the simplest for any given application. I realize someone not running Windows would care a bit more, but really, how much more? If somebody's running 50+ desktop apps and having dependency hell these days, I would challenge them to consider if worrying about their package format of choice is really worth it when they could use lxc. Yes, it's unfortunate that the Linux desktop story still requires casual users to learn developer/sysadmin tooling, but as far as I can tell, none of these package formats solves that, so may as well learn lxc for any CLI needs. It can even run desktop GUI apps if configured properly, although I still think most people aren't running very many of those these days.

• Personally I can't say I much care. When I first heard about the independent packaging I was told snaps are slower so I went with flatpak and at this point I have a complete setup and I memorized the commands. So really I'm just sticking with flatpaks bc I got comfortable with them first.

• Snaps are not only antithetical to the unix philosophy of configurability and reusability, but a giant step in the direction of more bloat, more wasting resources and more forcing users into crap they never agreed to, while ignoring their real demands.
  I'm pretty sure the answer to dependency hell is refactoring your application and cleaning up the package manager dependencies, not shipping your app with a full crappy OS and generic unoptimized libraries that run equally poorly on every system.

  Like every other tool they do have some justifiable use cases. However in reality they are being overused and forced down user's throats because developers are too lazy to test that their already bloated software integrates smoothly in most users' systems.

  I have spent a decent amount of time configuring and optimizing my system and making sure things run in a way that is useful to me. Snapcraft wasting a good chunk of my SSD, using a separate package manager, polluting my filesystems and eating up more CPU and RAM than they need to is just infuriating.

• Perhaps you need to re-title this video to "Non-Native Packaging System" instead of "Snap".

• Snaps, flatpaks and all the other ones that I can't remember the name of can be a pain in the arse but I've warmed to them in some cases. I'm currently using Ubuntu on my current workstation as its the only "approved" Linux distro that my employer and the odd Snap for apps like Teams and Firefox are very convenient.

• I think snaps is a good idea. Ubuntu, imao is kinda like the Windows of Linux, and as a community we want more and more people (aka nubs) to join Linux. People want to USE the computer, they don't come to run sudo or lsblk on their system For that you can always become an Archers or a Fedorians

• I don't care about this package manager war. I just appreciate we Linux users have bigger and bigger software avalability. This is crucial thing if we want Linux to be huge. I'm using Mint which has snaps blocked by default and I removed the block. I think I got more flatpaks and only few snaps, but I like all these options. They always work for me. No reason to hate one or another.

• Maybe stupid question, but if the backend is propriatary, how do we know that software x, that is opensource, is really delivered to us as the code specifies? I don't want to accuse canonical of messing the packages but I prefer it if they are quite literally unable to do so

• I like snaps. For me they just work 🙂

• yes it does. fck snap

• I feel like not mentioning that sometimes, doing "apt install xxx" in Ubuntu will silently install the application as a Snap in the background is pretty deceiving.

• No, they don't.

  But somehow, we can't install chromium using apt, this is the main problem.

• It deserves more negativity!

• I dont like neither snap nor flat packages, I shall never use them.
  if you are a true LINUX user, you should not use them. but if you do, Go back to Windows Vista.

• god dammit…
  he just said "yet another packaging system"
  I can already hear the developer typing away creating that…

• snoop

• hate snaps always break my files.

• I think much of the negativity comes from the passion people can have over Linux. When i used Ubuntu I used snaps and didnt really think to much about it and when i use pop_OS! I also don't really notice much. If anything that just shows the success of both. For my use case I dont really have a hard requirement to opt for one over another.

• Both flats and snaps are crap. Flats are a security nightmare. Either all I just compile and run myself like I do with all my progams.

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