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.
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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?
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corporate linux apologists promoting proprietary ecosystems are still corporate apologists promoting proprietary ecosystems
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.
Not wanting to elect dictators is anti-democracy!
Basically the same logic
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.”
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).
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 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-server
seems 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.
The more snaps you have, the slower your machine will boot. It’s uniquely shit technology that should die already.
Anti-Snap is pro-consumer. Using Ubuntu at all is anti-consumer, I would rather Mint or just Debian.
I think that phrases like ‘anti-consumer’ can stick to any target, so long as they’re thrown with a sufficient amount of bullshit.
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.
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…
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
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
snapd
doing some auto update.Ubuntu server should have
snapd
disabled. 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
dnf
requires 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?