Snap taking a dump into the output of "mount" alone is reason enough for me to hate it. I want to see my drives, not that three bundles of libraries are separately mounted into "firefox snap dir" and three others into "snap base package dir" or whatever. There are other offenders, but Snap is the worst. I resort to "df" these days, but it doesn't show filesystem type and mount flags.
No way. Flatpaks are clearly represented in the software shops of their adopted distros (I use Fedora and Pop!_OS, both of which use Flatpak).
From the software shop GUI, I can choose flatpak or dnf/apt from the dropdown. From the command-line, flatpak has its own commands (vs. apt silent under-the-hood behavior).
Flatpak is better than Snap. I use Flatpak for commercial software (Discord, Steam, etc.), but it remains my choice as a user.
The point is totally different: the purpose of both is upstream-managed distribution, consider individual distro like a container ship to be loaded, something not to care about, a commodity.
We know the arguments: often distro packagers are late to update, some projects are very complex to be packaged and demand gazillion of resources to be built, upstream devs on contrary will surely keep they project package up-to-date, sandboxing is good for safety etc. BUT we also know the outcome: 99% of such packages are full of outdated and vulnerable deps, they are themselves mostly outdated, since they are not packaged by the upstream devs who just publish the code as usual, and they have many holes punched here and there because a browser that allow to download some files but you can't open them in other apps is useless, as a pdf reader who can't read a file because it's outside the right place. Beside that you get a 30+Gb desktop deploy instead of a 10Gb, dab performances, polluted home directory, very scarce ability to automate AND all of them still need a classic package manager since they can't handle the base system.
So why them? Because SOME upstream do not want to allow third party distribute their binaries, they are commercial vendor. They NEED such system to sell they products ensuring they can work as a cancer in an open ecosystem, not designed to be a ship for something but a unique individual desktop anyone tune as he/she want.
That's why they are crap.
The next step to classic package management is the declarative/IaC one, like NixOS or Guix System. Those who want Snap, Flatpack, Appimage, ... just want Windows, with all the bloats and issues of Windows.
Just like they wasted time and effort on Unity and shuttered it in favor of Gnome, and they wasted time and effort on Mir and shuttered it in favor of Wayland, and they wasted time and effort on Upstart and shuttered it in favor of systemd.
Canonical will fail once again, but only after jerking the community around for multiple years.
> Just like they wasted time and effort on Unity and shuttered it in favor of Gnome
Unity served well for years, it would have needed a rewrite anyway for the post x11 era, so indeed there have been wasted resources, but experiments are also important in technology, and many still love what was (is) the unity user experience.
> and they wasted time and effort on Mir and shuttered it in favor of Wayland
Mir is still there and it's used. It's now a Wayland compositor but it maintains its API, the different communication protocol doesn't change its purposes.
> and they wasted time and effort on Upstart and shuttered it in favor of systemd.
When Upstart started and was used no systemd existed or was designed, so it served many well for years. Not a waste.
They didn't invest much into Upstart at all, and quickly announced a switch after Debian adopted systemd.
They still maintain Mir, as a Wayland display server.
Unity was one of the most popular desktop environments and brought Ubuntu users a lot of value over the years. It even influenced the design of GNOME 3.
I didn't understand much of the unity hate, especially compared to things like gnome 3. Really wish I could have HUD, combined titlebar/top panel, and typo-resilient search back. The latter two are possible with gnome extensions but don't work quite as well.
It's not so much hating what they do but the manner in which they do it. CLAs and not contributing upstream from the get-go means Canonical's special stuff cannot go further than Canonical.
Community forks of e.g. Unity have cropped up that ditch the CLA. Open source is open source, after all.
That said I do agree that the CLA has doomed most of their projects from gaining considerable adoption in the wider Linux community. At least while Canonical is still running the project.
Yeah I'm generally critical of Canonical for these moves, but Upstart is one I actually think was good and well done, as was their decision to move to systemd. Upstart was more pre-systemd anyway. IIRC Red Hat also used Upstart for a major release as well before moving all the way to systemd.
Yeah this is exactly it. I don't really give a damn about snaps. But when I use apt to install something, and the OS silently installs a snap version instead, that's not acceptable to me. I'm not going to ever use Ubuntu again where I have a choice, personally.
> Cloud images no longer preseed any snaps by default
Yes! Small improvement, but still.