Agreed.

For any (k)ubuntu refugees, do as I did and switch to Debian!

How do snaps make money for Canonical?

Money is literally the very incarnation of evil via the Talisman it bears.

If they trying to make money then they are, not a fiber of otherwise, Evil.

You’re decision to not recognize the blatant & obvious Talisman does not make you correct. It’s not your choice. It’s the choice of that occult chant and signature.

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It is absolutely a different situation if it is opt-in. If Ubuntu made Snaps opt-in, people might not like them but it’d be a minor critique instead of fleeing the distro.

@[email protected]
The difference with Fedora Atomic, which I think you refer to, is that it’s totally open. For example, people started using the OCI containers differently than Fedora intended, which resulted in uBlue and stuff like Bazzite.

Also, no one forces you to use Flatpak. You can still use Distrobox and use Pacman/ APT/ DNF/ whatever you prefer and export your apps that way. It’s just that Flatpak “won” and doesn’t have many drawbacks, and is very convenient. I mostly like them.

And, most importantly, Fedora is the fronteer of innovation.
There were many projects and ideas that failed, but many more succedded (Wayland, image based distros, etc.), and Project Atomic is just one more “testing ground” that is well thought out imo. Therefore people are expecting to “test out” new generation Linux stuff, it’s just part of Fedora. If you don’t like that, use Debian instead.

I can recommend you to give Fedora Atomic a chance, it’s an extremely nice family of distros (e.g. Bluefin/ Aurora, Bazzite, etc.)!

Edit: one more thing is that Fedora is, in contrast to Ubuntu, not controlled by a company. RedHat doesn’t have nearly as much influence as people think, it’s mainly community driven, and therefore choices aren’t (in theory) influenced by $$$

Well there is immutable, which you probably refer to with Fedoras new distro, and then there is Canonical pushing their shitty snap format, and kinda non-sideloading. Can’t wait for the day when apt only ever allows to install snap packages.

Fedora Silverblue is in an entirely different ball game. You can’t use dnf because it’s an immutable image based system where you can’t make direct changes to the Root system without making use of the rpm-ostree & VCS mechanisms. You’re making a conscious choice by using Fedora Silverblue, and the pros out way the cons for most people making that choice.
In contrast Fedora Workstation allows you to use dnf just as normal because it’s not an immutable image based system.
Ubuntu doesn’t make use of any such system so their reliance on containerized user-space apps isn’t a technical one.

People love using flatpaks instead (yes I know of all the shortcomings, but you can always choose another install method for that broken package).

Not on Ubuntu nor Fedora, but yes: If a “larger” package breaks on update and there is no fix available and I use that application on a pretty much daily basis, then I remove it and install the Flatpak variant.

Flatpaks are slower, do not work super well with Wayland (especially scaling, some applications have GIANT text, some have 5 pixels large text, but fortunately I was able to circumvent those issues for most applications I use via Flatpak), and you need to run another system for updates and updates are friggin slow.

flatpak-update () { 
    LATEST_NVIDIA=$(flatpak list | grep "GL.nvidia" | cut -f2 | cut -d '.' -f5)
    flatpak update
    flatpak remove --unused --delete-data
    flatpak list | grep org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia- | cut -f2 | grep -v "$LATEST_NVIDIA" | xargs -o flatpak uninstall
    flatpak repair
    flatpak update
}

On the other hand, the applications provided via Flatpak just work.

And messing with 32 bits multilib dependency hell for Steam or installing pretty much half of Kde just for Kdenlive simply isn’t something I want.

Right. I just installed OpenSUSE MicroOS to try out, and it’s the same idea. I agree with some of the anti-snap rhetoric. Closed, Canonical-centric system for profit; linking placeholder debs to download a snap. But the philosophy of all user applications come as chunky but robust packages that (almost) don’t interfere with each other and the system - I think that might be the future for safer computing for non-technical users.

CosmOS?

Don’t forget the random punctuation mixed in. It’s like the title of a kids’ tv show.

never thought of “poop os” but I think Pop!_OS is a stupid name, it’s the only reason I avoided it and chose Nobara instead lol

It’s 2024, use an adblocker

Why anyone browses the web in 2024 without an adblocker is completely beyond my ability to understand. You get zero sympathy from me.

Ublock origin

Remember Unity? They got it popular and well liked and then killed it.

But even if it is, it shouldn’t prevent installing released debs you find for example on GitHub repositories.

Some things we would want to install aren’t in the official repos. Downloading the deb file is a solution to that for newer users.

A lot of software wont be distributed with a PPA to add.

Additionally, debs are useful for offline installations, with apt you’re able to recursively download a package and all of it’s dependencies as deb files, then transfer those over to the offline machine and install in bulk.

That being said I’ve never had great luck with the software center, it’s always felt broken. I’ll typically just dpkg -I <pkg>.

Yes, depending on the context

You should try MX, it’s Debian based, and they have their own repo full of .deb, up to date, never break

You only got part of the quote, and not the part that really is what the article is about.

I understand that Canonical has every right to make the decision about their product. You want to promote Snap over Deb, fine. But don’t do it in a deceiving manner.

And there is a pretty reasonable middle ground:

If you would like to keep your ‘Snap store’ deb-free, fine! At least have the decency to provide Gdebi by default for local deb file installation.

It’s about not being able to install .deb packages through the installation GUI.

The whole snap issue is hardly a pet peeve. Let alone in an LTS release.

giving me something for free

What are you talking about? It is not even “for free”, they get a lot value from the community.

They’re nothing without the users, it’s not that they would be making it if nobody uses it anyways. Users used to love them, they trusted them, they went on spreading their system, reported issues, created tutorials, flavors, videos, tools, and so on, they helped Cannonical become what it is now.

I don’t think they’re giving us anything “for free.”

The software is broken in an obvious way, even though it used to work and they could just roll it back for the release.

They are actively trying to harm the community to somehow “force” users into snaps.

Even apt is deliberately broken:

“[If] You use ‘sudo apt install chromium’, you get a Snap package of Chromium instead of Debian”

Canonical even patched apt a bit so it prefers to install snaps first.

It is about installing .deb that you manually downloaded from somewhere. You can’t install them by double clicking on them, you have to install from command line.