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Snaps are Canonical's choice for "cross distro" package management that they are trying to force on everyone else. They came out of nowhere and it doesn't play

Snaps are Canonical's choice for "cross distro" package management that they are trying to force on everyone else. They came out of nowhere and it doesn't play well with other distros. If you want a nice-from-first-principals approach to package management for desktop apps, Flatpak is the shit: it uses a Git-like distribution system that's specifically built for operating system size snapshots. You get to pick your underlying distribution (or roll your own) and the sandboxing mechanism just wraps around secomp-bfp so it stacks well with SELinux or AppArmor or whatever. But now we are going to have yet-another-bifurcation of OSS solutions: RPM vs DEB, KDE vs GNOME, Wayland vs Mir. Canonical, stop trying to be Apple, please.

daveguy 10y ago
> it uses a Git-like distribution system that's specifically built for operating system size snapshots. You get to pick your underlying distribution (or roll your own) and the sandboxing mechanism just wraps around secomp-bfp so it stacks well with SELinux or AppArmor or whatever. Is security compatibility the primary advantage over docker? When I see these I always think, why not docker? Git like distribution, pick underlying / roll your own. I'm not sure why these are better than a docker or rkt.
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
  Docker doesn't work for desktop gui apps. Also it doesn't provide great security sandboxing. Also docker is not the first containerisation solution why not LXC?
  - fulafel 10y ago
    It works for GUI apps, see eg. https://hub.docker.com/r/tomparys/skype/ https://hub.docker.com/r/tomparys/skype/
    - satai 10y ago
      X11 only, no Wayland :-/
    - gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
      OK but now you've forwarded your x you're not really containing the gui app very strongly anymore.
      - fulafel 10y ago
        Docker doesn't support user namespaces properly so this is the situation anyway. Good reason to use LXD - or to run Docker under LXD[1] :) [1] https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/04/13/stephane-graber-lxd-2-0-docker-in-lxd-712/ https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/04/13/stephane-graber-lxd-2...
    - OJFord 10y ago
      It was far too laggy for real use when I tried with Firefox a couple of months ago. That might be XQuartz's fault rather than Docker's - I only tried on macOS.
  - daveguy 10y ago
    > why not LXC The git-like version control available with docker or rkt (and apparently these package manager based systems too).
pjmlp 10y ago
> Canonical, stop trying to be Apple, please. I love that they try to be Apple, before them only Mandrake and SuSE cared for what actually matters to desktop users. As for "yet-another-bifurcation of OSS solutions", that is the nature of the game. Isn't that what so many praise about FOSS? Welcome to the UNIX wars, re-edited as GNU/Linux wars.
- flukus 10y ago
  They have a serious case of NIH though. They put a lot into desktop linux but most of it seems to be a replication of effort.
  - willtim 10y ago
    Didn't Snap appear first? Why is FlatPak not an example of NIH?
    - seenitall 10y ago
      Exactly. Snaps grew out of the work to make Ubuntu mobile phone apps secure and easy to update. They are a great way to publish software, worth creating regardless of all the anti-canonical trolling. And they work fine across distros except where RH has actively tried to cripple them. That's their right, but wow, toxic.
      - jhasse 10y ago
        > RH has actively tried to cripple them Source? Snaps require AppArmor which is used by Ubuntu and openSUSE. This makes it harder to integrate Snaps into Red Had (SELinux) distros, but I wouldn't say that this is something RH does actively to cripple them.
        mhall119 10y ago
        Snaps need a security backend like AppArmor in order to run in confinement. Without it, they can still be run unconfined. And while AppArmor+seccomp is the only working security backend, snapd is designed to support alternate backends, so one could be made for SELinux, we just need someone with SELinux experience to write it (our in-house expertise is in AppArmor)
Lintaris 10y ago
This is not what I expect to read on HN. Take your anti-Ubuntu zealotry elsewhere.
padraic7a 10y ago
"Snaps are Canonical's choice for "cross distro" package management that they are trying to force on everyone else." How are they trying to force it on anyone? I understand that there is a Canonical / Red Hat rivalry. But I think language like this adds more heat than light to the discussion which should really be about the merits of the different solutions.
- itomato 10y ago
  They supposedly put words into Red Hat's mouth by saying Snappy had support it clearly didn't have.
vegabook 10y ago
Having tried Elementary OS, various versions of Fedora, Suse, and even Mageia and Bodhi (e17 desktop), I have never found a compelling story away from Ubuntu's overwhelming advantage in online resources for non-greybeards like me. Last night, compiling mesa, with all the weirdo dependencies, this was brought home to me as half the time as I typed in an obscure package that I had to find, Google was autocompleting it with "ubuntu" appended on it. Says it all. And in my mind, snap is already gaining massively more mind-share than flatpak and everything else and that's why it's almost certain to win. And that's a good thing. It's good because Ubuntu does desktop awareness better than anyone else, in my opinion, and of course, half the battle is community building. Not just the tech. That said, I will hand it to Fedora on ARM, where I use it quite extensively on dev boards.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
billsmithaustin 10y ago
I understand that Canonical proposes Snaps as a standard, but can you be specific about how they are trying to force it on everyone else?
dustinkirkland 10y ago
Competition between every one of those projects have made each of them better.

daveguy 10y ago

> it uses a Git-like distribution system that's specifically built for operating system size snapshots. You get to pick your underlying distribution (or roll your own) and the sandboxing mechanism just wraps around secomp-bfp so it stacks well with SELinux or AppArmor or whatever. Is security compatibility the primary advantage over docker? When I see these I always think, why not docker? Git like distribution, pick underlying / roll your own. I'm not sure why these are better than a docker or rkt.

gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
Docker doesn't work for desktop gui apps. Also it doesn't provide great security sandboxing. Also docker is not the first containerisation solution why not LXC?
- fulafel 10y ago
  It works for GUI apps, see eg. https://hub.docker.com/r/tomparys/skype/ https://hub.docker.com/r/tomparys/skype/
  - satai 10y ago
    X11 only, no Wayland :-/
  - gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
    OK but now you've forwarded your x you're not really containing the gui app very strongly anymore.
    - fulafel 10y ago
      Docker doesn't support user namespaces properly so this is the situation anyway. Good reason to use LXD - or to run Docker under LXD[1] :) [1] https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/04/13/stephane-graber-lxd-2-0-docker-in-lxd-712/ https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/04/13/stephane-graber-lxd-2...
  - OJFord 10y ago
    It was far too laggy for real use when I tried with Firefox a couple of months ago. That might be XQuartz's fault rather than Docker's - I only tried on macOS.
- daveguy 10y ago
  > why not LXC The git-like version control available with docker or rkt (and apparently these package manager based systems too).

pjmlp 10y ago

> Canonical, stop trying to be Apple, please. I love that they try to be Apple, before them only Mandrake and SuSE cared for what actually matters to desktop users. As for "yet-another-bifurcation of OSS solutions", that is the nature of the game. Isn't that what so many praise about FOSS? Welcome to the UNIX wars, re-edited as GNU/Linux wars.

flukus 10y ago
They have a serious case of NIH though. They put a lot into desktop linux but most of it seems to be a replication of effort.
- willtim 10y ago
  Didn't Snap appear first? Why is FlatPak not an example of NIH?
  - seenitall 10y ago
    Exactly. Snaps grew out of the work to make Ubuntu mobile phone apps secure and easy to update. They are a great way to publish software, worth creating regardless of all the anti-canonical trolling. And they work fine across distros except where RH has actively tried to cripple them. That's their right, but wow, toxic.
    - jhasse 10y ago
      > RH has actively tried to cripple them Source? Snaps require AppArmor which is used by Ubuntu and openSUSE. This makes it harder to integrate Snaps into Red Had (SELinux) distros, but I wouldn't say that this is something RH does actively to cripple them.
      - mhall119 10y ago
        Snaps need a security backend like AppArmor in order to run in confinement. Without it, they can still be run unconfined. And while AppArmor+seccomp is the only working security backend, snapd is designed to support alternate backends, so one could be made for SELinux, we just need someone with SELinux experience to write it (our in-house expertise is in AppArmor)

Lintaris 10y ago

This is not what I expect to read on HN. Take your anti-Ubuntu zealotry elsewhere.

padraic7a 10y ago

"Snaps are Canonical's choice for "cross distro" package management that they are trying to force on everyone else." How are they trying to force it on anyone? I understand that there is a Canonical / Red Hat rivalry. But I think language like this adds more heat than light to the discussion which should really be about the merits of the different solutions.

itomato 10y ago
They supposedly put words into Red Hat's mouth by saying Snappy had support it clearly didn't have.

vegabook 10y ago

Having tried Elementary OS, various versions of Fedora, Suse, and even Mageia and Bodhi (e17 desktop), I have never found a compelling story away from Ubuntu's overwhelming advantage in online resources for non-greybeards like me. Last night, compiling mesa, with all the weirdo dependencies, this was brought home to me as half the time as I typed in an obscure package that I had to find, Google was autocompleting it with "ubuntu" appended on it. Says it all. And in my mind, snap is already gaining massively more mind-share than flatpak and everything else and that's why it's almost certain to win. And that's a good thing. It's good because Ubuntu does desktop awareness better than anyone else, in my opinion, and of course, half the battle is community building. Not just the tech. That said, I will hand it to Fedora on ARM, where I use it quite extensively on dev boards.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

billsmithaustin 10y ago

I understand that Canonical proposes Snaps as a standard, but can you be specific about how they are trying to force it on everyone else?

dustinkirkland 10y ago

Competition between every one of those projects have made each of them better.