anti-snap stance is anti-consumer
anti-snap stance is anti-consumer
The title is a quote from Mastodon. I’ve always seen dislike towards snap so I was taken back when I saw this stance. The person who wrote this was referring to Tuxedo Laptops.
What are your thoughts on this?
EDIT:
Here’s the original comment: https://mastodon.social/@popey/112591863166141029
EDIT 2:
Some clarification for those accusing me of not following the thread or being disingenuous.
Didn't bother to follow the thread?
I posted my question here before this particular response from the OP. I asked the question on Lemmy out of interest and wanting to get a wider perspective. I also engaged with the OP on the thread so that I can get their perspective on their stance.
Listen, I don't even like Flatpaks, but at least they're multi-platform and non-proprietary.
But the original poster is probably of the opinion that "pro-consumer" means something that "just works", and if it's a walled garden, so what?
"Why is there barbed wire at the top of that wall?" "Don't worry about it."
That would be a somewhat valid argument if Snaps "just worked" any better than Flatpaks. That has not been my experience.
Given the choice between an open standard and a proprietary one, the proprietary one damn well better have meaningful technological advantages. I don't see that with Snaps. All I see is a company pouring effort into a system whose only value is that they are pouring effort into it. They should put that effort into something better.
Granted, it's been a few years since I used Ubuntu and Snaps. Perhaps things have improved. It was nothing but headaches for me. A curse upon whoever decided to package apps that obviously require full file system access as Snaps. "User-friendly", indeed.
From an enterprise/server perspective, when what you're really paying for is first-party support, I guess Snaps make more sense. But again, that effort could be put toward something more useful.
I keep expecting them to die like Unity DE
Genuinely curious: what don't you like about flatpaks?
I find that flatpaks are quite awesome, because you can have any distro, while all apps continue to work (but I'm also not a dev or anything, so don't know about that side of the story).
Duplication of resources mainly. Bloat upon bloat. Worse, a Flatpak can ignore things that it probably should use on the system, and I'm not sure that's a good thing.
Don't get me wrong, there are supposed "bare metal" installs that duplicate all sorts of things too, and I don't like it when that happens either. Steam, for example, keeps at least one extra copy of itself as well as a bunch of other things.
And there's that Flatpaks an entirely different ecosystem that require their own set of updates.
I get it. I understand there are benefits. Doesn't mean I like it.
Probably along the lines of 'its bloated and too many dependencies'.
Though most flatpaks use a common base, any modifications on top of that sometimes need to be stored modified (now having 2 or more copies of one dependency)
To anyone that's not a Linux nerd the app looks about the same size as on all other OS's, but on Linux it makes it a lot larger than just bare bones installing it via package manager
Not to mention they are optional and not a replacement for something that worked fine.
That's stupid. Nothing stops you from just installing regular Ubuntu if you love snaps so much.
Or just installing Snap afterwards
corporate linux apologists promoting proprietary ecosystems are still corporate apologists promoting proprietary ecosystems
Wonderfully put! Thanks.
Type this:
apt install firefox
Into your terminal on Ubuntu and you'll see what is anti-customer.
Yup. I had no problem with snaps or Ubuntu until I saw that underhanded bullshit.
I feel like they shot themselves in the knee. Even if it was buggy I would of still tried to use it for fun. However, when they first came out I found out about them because it caused me to be unable to work. I used apt to install a CLI tool and then the CLI tool wasn't working. I tried to manually get it from the Ubuntu repo only to discover it was snap only.
It really pissed me off.
I switched to Debian, partly because of snaps, what exactly is going on here with Ubuntu?
You can install Firefox only as a snap on Ubuntu. There's no native package on the official repo.
I think a lot of the flak directed towards snap would be mitigated if they made the backend open source. I know there are some efforts to produce alternative backends (although the one I knew about
lol/lol-serverseems to have gone dark).Another issue is Canonical's rather strong armed and forceful approach to making people use snaps rather than the OSs native packaging system, again, not something that should be an issue in theory but when people already have a negative view of the format to start with...
Personally I don't really have an issue with Snaps. I've had more luck with them and fewer issues than Flatpaks (which I also tend to avoid like the plague) but that is probably just because I prefer to use appimages or native packages rather than having to fight the sandbox permissions and weird things it can do to apps that don't take Snaps and Flatpaks properly into account.
Yeah I wouldn't hate snaps if it wasn't for canonical saying they wouldn't force them on people, then making
aptinstall snaps instead of .debs without the user asking for it.They won't open source snaps because they want to control the snap ecosystem to make money off of it for an IPO
I wonder if it probably wouldn't (or at least wouldn't have) done any harm to do so seeing as if you look at Flatpak, its most obvious comparison, although it can have multiple remotes, Flathub is the only one that is realistically used and is the de-facto standard.
The more snaps you have, the slower your machine will boot. It's uniquely shit technology that should die already.
That's an interesting comment from a guy that used to work for Canonical, and then went anti-snap pretty hard, to the point that he made this:
lol, love that
No see he loves snaps so much he made a utility to unistall it To reinstall it again!
Yeah no snaps are a bad format they are not FOSS in my book.
Anti-Snap is pro-consumer. Using Ubuntu at all is anti-consumer, I would rather Mint or just Debian.
I don't think he knows what "anti-consumer" means
That's one of the dumbest things I ever heard
Not wanting to elect dictators is anti-democracy!
Basically the same logic
I'll be honest with y'all. If your decision to not buy something from a hardware manufacturer is based on that they've modified their optional Ubuntu install, this hardware wasn't for you to begin with
That was my thought initially as well. Just install the OS you want, how you want.
There already is Flatpak. Many proprietary apps are shipped as Snaps, which helps with Flatpak packaging as the binaries can just be packed into a different container.
Snap developers kinda help with making the whole portals, isolated apps stuff work.
But thats about it.
The Venn diagram of supported apps isn't also a perfect circle. You can't run VPNs as Flatpaks, and Flathub disallows CLI apps from being submitted (because the UX of using a sandboxed CLI app sucks). Snap doesn't have these issues.
because the UX of using a sandboxed CLI app sucks
I think it is more because of this issue because as far as I know snaps have some level of sandbox and you can still use CLI apps as you said.
I think it's a short term vs long term debate. In the short term snaps are nice. They might help you get that software you want right now. In the long term though, it will only take away some of your rights and make you into a product.
There are also some interesting things to say about wording. Specifically consumer vs user. Software is not consumed, it's used and depending on the specific software, the user might be abused by the people producing and controlling the software.
I think that phrases like 'anti-consumer' can stick to any target, so long as they're thrown with a sufficient amount of bullshit.
Can you link the original quote? I feel like there is a lot of context missing here.
Sure! I’ve added it to the post as well.
Didn't bother to follow the thread?
https://mastodon.social/@popey/112593520847827981>
Sure. Other people can do that if they want.
I don't have a problem with companies bundling whatever packages they want on their distro.
The difference comes when they actively block installation (just like Mint does). That is what is anti-consumer. It adds confusion to users as they have to go and find out what random file in /etc/ needs to be edited or removed, just to install some software. It's stupid.
You may disagree, that's fine. It's okay to not like things.
Judge Tuxedo's reasonings here: https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Infos/Help-Support/Frequently-asked-questions/Why-does-TUXEDO-OS-not-support-Snap-.tuxedo
I think I now know where I'll order my next computer from.
Guy called me a nerd just for pointing out Tuxedo even explains on their website how to install snap.
It made a lot of sense after seeing he used to work at Canonical, lol.
I’m of the same opinion as you. I tried to understand why OP has said opinion (that’s why I posted here and engaged with them). Thank you for positively adding to the conversation.
Wow, I didn't know Canonical apologist is a thing.
The difference comes when they actively *block* installation (just like Mint does).
Dude's anti-Mint as well. From a different comment, seems like he works (or worked) for Ubuntu.
You know what seems more anti-consumer to me? Trash-talking your competition for making different choices to you with your FOSS they're legally allowed to re-distribute with any changes they like.
It's almost like if people don't prefer those changes or something then they won't be popular? Oh wait, Mint is hugely popular...
Snap annoys the piss outta me because of the forced updates. That said, never ever had a snap package not work for me. Whereas installing some things from apt just doesn't work for whatever reason.
My guess at the stance is I'd imagine it's that switching away from snaps is switching away from Ubuntu's support and security monitoring and updates to some less known/reliable/diligent third party?
Popey (Alan Pope) used to work for Canonical / Ubuntu, so he's presumably not inclined to jump on the bandwagon of Canonical/Ubuntu/snap hate since he knows a lot of Canonical and Ubuntu people and their motivations and work. Not that there aren't good reasons to criticize snap or other Canonical decisions, but it's also plain that a lot of people just join a hate bandwagon and don't even know what about it they object to. There is masses of wrong-headed criticism of Canonical out there e.g. I've frequently seen people criticize creating Upstart, saying Canonical should have used systemd, or bzr vs git! Presumably these people were annoyed at Canonical for not inventing a time machine.
Are you refering to this comment?
https://mastodon.social/@popey/112591863166141029
@bytebro Yeah, their butchered Ubuntu install, and anti-snap stance is anti-consumer.
Yes I am.
I have a standing fatwa on snap only because it comes installed and enabled by default on Ubuntu server. Maybe it's good for grandmas laptop but it's kill-on-sight in a server environment. Every Ubuntu server I've seen has eventually been taken offline without any warning because of
snapddoing some auto update.Ubuntu server should have
snapddisabled. Ubuntu shouldn't be the default distro for VPS providers. AFAIK its only the default because its the distro most people might have prior experience with.While I'm at it, Fedora is also on my shit list as
dnfrequires over a gig of memory to do a major version upgrade.You don't have to install Ubuntu on those laptops. I don't really understand his point. He wants snaps?
Use apt. Its more secure.
Except you can't