Upgraded Ubuntu to 22.04, where Firefox is Snap by default. Wasn’t going to fight it, especially since Canonical has made 3 blog posts talking about how much faster they made Firefox on Snap.
Since then, I’ve had subtle but annoying issues.
- Can’t Google things that have a colon after the first word- i.e.
error: file not founddoesn’t work - I get notifications for pending updates
- Other apps like Gnome’s Software take a minute+ to load on my beefy computer
This isn’t even a meme. Snap is trash. I wanted to be neutral and not join the “hate train” but seriously. Snap is that bad.
Packaging is on the distro maintainers and not the developers. Or at least it shouldn’t be.
This was never the case even before all of these new solutions. When a developer makes something, they’re going to release it for people to use. They generally are not going to just leave it sitting in a repo and let people figure out building it themselves until a distro maintainer happens to package it.
The traditional approach is very good for core components and staples of the desktop where distro developers can curate an experience where everything works with everything and is in harmony. It’s not, however, very good at getting applications the end user cares about out there. Flatpak/Appimage and traditional packages complement each other nicely and cover each others’ flaws.
So what’s the point of having distros then? Why not jusy snapOS or flatpak OS?
Curation and guaranteed interoperability.
The best part of Linux is shared libraries and being able to see exactly what dependencies will be installed. With snap and flatpak all of the libraries ship with the package. You mind as well go back to windows if that’s the way you wanna do things.
No thanks, I’ll enjoy free software :)
What kind of a response is that? All you’ve said is thses alternatives are good because it makes it easier on the developers. So how have all these great free softwares come about over the past three decades without being distributed with their own libraries?
(One of) The reason they have been able to flourish is because they rely on the libraries all other free software projects rely on. Once you start down your path you will end up with super bloated systems with who knows what running ‘sandboxed’.
Again, diatros exist to manage their package base. If something like Debian is too slow to integrate new packages into their stable repos then switch to a different distro that does.
You told me I might as well go to Windows, as if the only benefit of using Linux is its traditional approach to package management. I use it because I care about freedom, not because of how it handles package management, though I do happen to also like that (it’s just better when supplemented by flatpaks and appimages).
If you read my other comments in this thread, you’ll see why I prefer things as they are now: I can actually access most applications from most distributions without having to build shit myself. Before flatpak and the like, everything would just be a deb and if you’re very lucky, an rpm. If it was not up to the standards of your distribution or, more likely, too obscure to be noticed by them, your only option was to build it yourself. Being a Fedora user in the 00s meant every time you found some cool new thing you wanted to try out, your only option was to fumble around and figure out how to build it yourself. It sucked, and was a big part of why Ubuntu dominated so heavily. If you went anywhere other than Ubuntu and Debian, you were just opting out of a huge amount of software.
Also, it’s not just Debian Stable. Sid is too slow. Arch is too slow. Fedora is too slow. Ubuntu is too slow. Everything is too slow for the simple reason that maintainers can’t know about every obscure application you could possibly care about and won’t be packaging whatever random shit they find with a single star on github. Again: Traditional package managers are fantastic and have their place. While flatpak does deduplicate libraries through its runtime system and such to an extent, pacman and apt and dnf are much more efficient at doing so library-by-library, which is why (along with trusting distro maintainers to verify that everything works with everything else) I rely on them for the core parts of my system. There are many things they are simply better at. But when it comes to making it easy for developers to get their applications out into people’s hands and for users to actually get access to the applications they care about, flatpak and appimage do that very well.
I’m going to leave it at that and dip, because I’m frustrated with being (what seems like deliberately) misread.