6 ms·

Does Canonical have any 'push' motive for reducing dependence on apt? Or do they really just like snaps?

by lainga 7y ago

shockinglytrue 7y ago
Snaps (and Flatpak) are the app store pipe dream all over again, about 11.. 12? years too late. If anything treat them as early indicators of the future financials of these distros, if attempting this all over again is central to their future business model. Snap to me is synonymous with desperate. While I don't like the tech, the real reason Snap pushes me away from Ubuntu is the fear of this future where the app store dream turned out to be a failure again. What happens to the distro then?
pixelmonkey 7y ago
I think they just realized it gives them a way to package proprietary apps like Skype, Spotify, and Slack a bit more simply than would be required to apt-ify/dpkg-ify them. I really think that's the primary motivation.
- ronjouch 7y ago
  I don't know about Spotify, but both Skype and Slack are distributed with private apt repositories and it works just fine.
  - kingosticks 7y ago
    Spotify is too. Their deb repo is just outdated compared to their snap (which itself is outdated compared to what's available on macOS and Windows). I think it's fair to say they don't care much.
- Spivak 7y ago
  And it's a pretty good one since the experience with having a large catalog of useful software in Flatpaks has been awesome and largely seamless. I just wish Canonical wasn't off doing their own thing or had started out in the open from the start so it would have a chance of being a useful standard instead of the weird Canonical store.
  - vetinari 7y ago
    The number one reason why I don't like snap is: it puts Canonical in control. Only Canonical can run a store. Once you install something, Canonical decides, when packages on your computers will upgrade. Wrt control, it goes way beyond Apple store/Google Play/Microsoft Store. No thanks. Flatpak can preserve the benefits of decentralized repositories and upgrade under user control, with all the ease of packaging and sandboxing of the new toys.
  - sq_ 7y ago
    I can never figure out Canonical's logic with going off to do their own thing. They don't do it with everything, so clearly it's not a complete rejection of things not made in-house. It seems like they also often end up going back to the community solutions/standards eventually, so what benefit do they see in doing this over and over again?
    - mulmen 7y ago
      Does it force the community solution to improve? If the options are community or Canonical does that competition have benefits to both? Not sure Canonical are thinking that explicitly but maybe it’s just hedging their bets if the community solution doesn’t work out.
      - fapjacks 7y ago
        But this is a false dichotomy, because Flatpak is a project controlled by Red Hat. Unless by "community" project you mean AppImages.
        mulmen 7y ago
        I'm speaking in general, this would also include the Gnome churn a few years ago. Canonical seems to build their own thing then abandon it in favor of what the community was doing before or during the development of the Canonical thing. I'm just spitballing why that may happen.
        7y ago
- flatiron 7y ago
  I like the way arch does it. They have AUR and everything is there and they can just say they don’t support it.
  - adito 7y ago
    I think ubuntu also has similar stuff via PPA repository?
    - readwind 7y ago
      PPA is hell. Arch is love and life.
      - Koshkin 7y ago
        Life, indeed. Reading the (excellent, mind you) documentation and, especially, the wiki is fun, I know, but sometimes I want to focus on something else (like getting things done).
        readwind 6y ago
        Totally agree, just have to report back that it's no huge'er job in terms of systems management. But am on your page. I guess it's relative, I was Ubuntu, too, because I liked the next-next-next ideology, but, when it comes to it, either system-types can be as maintenance free as any other. Rolling releases has the convenience of not being so difficult to upgrade, as you just roll along, you sometimes end up having to reinstall, on these systems like here, like Ubuntu and co I mean. But yeah work is what's most important. I've been a happy Ubuntu user for ages, glad you're getting your work done. It's all that matters relatively speaking. Thanks
      - ghthor 7y ago
        The AUR is so transparent. If I want to see how the AUR package is getting built, ez, read the PKGBUILD linked right from the packages page. I was immediately turned off to using Snap because I couldn't find how the Snap was built and really who built it. No Thanks, that's not how I install software on my personal computer anymore, it's one of the main reasons I exited windows as soon as I started to learn about infosec and trust.
- RMPR 7y ago
  If it's to avoid this kind of aberrations https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22864985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22864985 it's totally understandable, but in practice, it doesn't work that smoothly unfortunately, not to mention the potential vendor lockdown, or as the Mint team phrased it: > If you’re a Fedora user and you want to install Spotify, you’re told to go to https://snapcraft.io/spotify https://snapcraft.io/spotify. Spotify doesn’t distribute RPM packages, appimage, Flatpak or anything useful to a Fedora user who wants to download it, or to a Fedora maintainer who wants to add it to a repository. Fedora users are told to go to what is essentially a commercial store operated by a RedHat competitor where stats tell them their distribution is only 7th best. > We’re in luck, we can still download the .deb. If Spotify stops caring, what do we do? We move to snap because we have to? Will the snap store continue to let people download actual .snap files in the future or will that get locked down ? Will the snap store continue to operate without an Ubuntu One account or will we get vendor-locked ? https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3766 https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3766
- simosx 7y ago
  In all your examples, it is their respective company that does the packaging. Skype is packaged by Microsoft, and so on. Here is the Skype snap page, https://snapcraft.io/skype https://snapcraft.io/skype Canonical provides the tools and several companies are providing their software as snap packages. Another example is JetBrains that provide all their development environments as snap packages.
csdreamer7 7y ago
Snaps have benefits. Canonical sells 5 year service subscriptions in addition to the 5 years they already offer for free on LTS. Snaps enable a way to get the latest VSCode and other apps on very old versions of Ubuntu. Snaps allowed me to try out Debian and Fedora with minimal issues and easily integrate them into my dotfile manager with Ansible.
- Spivak 7y ago
  It's super super nice to have a real system for dealing with "pet" applications that users want to be updated outside of the distribution release cycle.
- SahAssar 7y ago
  That works with Flatpak/AppImage too though, right? For me Snap has always had that Canonical smell of not-invented-here, just like Mir, Unity and Upstart. All of those were eventually replaced with what a majority of similar linux distros settled on. I'm not saying it was wasted development or that nothing was learned but ultimately they joined the rest of the ecosystem instead of the ecosystem joining them. It seems that canonical does best when they embrace the ecosystem and not try to replace it.
  - jraph 7y ago
    Upstart actually preceded systemd and was adopted by Fedora, Red Hat, openSUSE and ChromeOS. ChromeOS still seems to use it, interestingly. It probably paved the way to systemd and probably fulfilled a need that no other init system could. Ubuntu was also fast to switch to systemd when it appeared. Canonical cannot be accused of NIH for Upstart, it was a widely adopted clean init system at the time and made many distro's boot times great again. Service configuration files were also very easy and clean. Unity was a desktop environment that both was liked by many people and reused many components from Gnome, I don't really see a problem here. A point could be made for Mir.
  - berkut 7y ago
    Just like with Upstart (which existed well before systemd did), Snap existed before Flatpak, and in fact existed in another form (Click) for two years before that. So it's wrong to say Canonical is guilty of NIH-syndrome with these two items, when their versions were out first. Whether the tech is any good is another matter.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

Does Canonical have any 'push' motive for reducing dependence on apt? Or do they really just like snaps?

by lainga 7y ago

Does Canonical have any 'push' motive for reducing dependence on apt? Or do they really just like snaps?

Snaps (and Flatpak) are the app store pipe dream all over again, about 11.. 12? years too late. If anything treat them as early indicators of the future financials of these distros, if attempting this all over again is central to their future business model. Snap to me is synonymous with desperate. While I don't like the tech, the real reason Snap pushes me away from Ubuntu is the fear of this future where the app store dream turned out to be a failure again. What happens to the distro then?

pixelmonkey 7y ago

I think they just realized it gives them a way to package proprietary apps like Skype, Spotify, and Slack a bit more simply than would be required to apt-ify/dpkg-ify them. I really think that's the primary motivation.

ronjouch 7y ago
I don't know about Spotify, but both Skype and Slack are distributed with private apt repositories and it works just fine.
- kingosticks 7y ago
  Spotify is too. Their deb repo is just outdated compared to their snap (which itself is outdated compared to what's available on macOS and Windows). I think it's fair to say they don't care much.
Spivak 7y ago
And it's a pretty good one since the experience with having a large catalog of useful software in Flatpaks has been awesome and largely seamless. I just wish Canonical wasn't off doing their own thing or had started out in the open from the start so it would have a chance of being a useful standard instead of the weird Canonical store.
- vetinari 7y ago
  The number one reason why I don't like snap is: it puts Canonical in control. Only Canonical can run a store. Once you install something, Canonical decides, when packages on your computers will upgrade. Wrt control, it goes way beyond Apple store/Google Play/Microsoft Store. No thanks. Flatpak can preserve the benefits of decentralized repositories and upgrade under user control, with all the ease of packaging and sandboxing of the new toys.
- sq_ 7y ago
  I can never figure out Canonical's logic with going off to do their own thing. They don't do it with everything, so clearly it's not a complete rejection of things not made in-house. It seems like they also often end up going back to the community solutions/standards eventually, so what benefit do they see in doing this over and over again?
  - mulmen 7y ago
    Does it force the community solution to improve? If the options are community or Canonical does that competition have benefits to both? Not sure Canonical are thinking that explicitly but maybe it’s just hedging their bets if the community solution doesn’t work out.
    - fapjacks 7y ago
      But this is a false dichotomy, because Flatpak is a project controlled by Red Hat. Unless by "community" project you mean AppImages.
      - mulmen 7y ago
        I'm speaking in general, this would also include the Gnome churn a few years ago. Canonical seems to build their own thing then abandon it in favor of what the community was doing before or during the development of the Canonical thing. I'm just spitballing why that may happen.
      - 7y ago
flatiron 7y ago
I like the way arch does it. They have AUR and everything is there and they can just say they don’t support it.
- adito 7y ago
  I think ubuntu also has similar stuff via PPA repository?
  - readwind 7y ago
    PPA is hell. Arch is love and life.
    - Koshkin 7y ago
      Life, indeed. Reading the (excellent, mind you) documentation and, especially, the wiki is fun, I know, but sometimes I want to focus on something else (like getting things done).
      - readwind 6y ago
        Totally agree, just have to report back that it's no huge'er job in terms of systems management. But am on your page. I guess it's relative, I was Ubuntu, too, because I liked the next-next-next ideology, but, when it comes to it, either system-types can be as maintenance free as any other. Rolling releases has the convenience of not being so difficult to upgrade, as you just roll along, you sometimes end up having to reinstall, on these systems like here, like Ubuntu and co I mean. But yeah work is what's most important. I've been a happy Ubuntu user for ages, glad you're getting your work done. It's all that matters relatively speaking. Thanks
    - ghthor 7y ago
      The AUR is so transparent. If I want to see how the AUR package is getting built, ez, read the PKGBUILD linked right from the packages page. I was immediately turned off to using Snap because I couldn't find how the Snap was built and really who built it. No Thanks, that's not how I install software on my personal computer anymore, it's one of the main reasons I exited windows as soon as I started to learn about infosec and trust.
RMPR 7y ago
If it's to avoid this kind of aberrations https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22864985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22864985 it's totally understandable, but in practice, it doesn't work that smoothly unfortunately, not to mention the potential vendor lockdown, or as the Mint team phrased it: > If you’re a Fedora user and you want to install Spotify, you’re told to go to https://snapcraft.io/spotify https://snapcraft.io/spotify. Spotify doesn’t distribute RPM packages, appimage, Flatpak or anything useful to a Fedora user who wants to download it, or to a Fedora maintainer who wants to add it to a repository. Fedora users are told to go to what is essentially a commercial store operated by a RedHat competitor where stats tell them their distribution is only 7th best. > We’re in luck, we can still download the .deb. If Spotify stops caring, what do we do? We move to snap because we have to? Will the snap store continue to let people download actual .snap files in the future or will that get locked down ? Will the snap store continue to operate without an Ubuntu One account or will we get vendor-locked ? https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3766 https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3766
simosx 7y ago
In all your examples, it is their respective company that does the packaging. Skype is packaged by Microsoft, and so on. Here is the Skype snap page, https://snapcraft.io/skype https://snapcraft.io/skype Canonical provides the tools and several companies are providing their software as snap packages. Another example is JetBrains that provide all their development environments as snap packages.

csdreamer7 7y ago

Snaps have benefits. Canonical sells 5 year service subscriptions in addition to the 5 years they already offer for free on LTS. Snaps enable a way to get the latest VSCode and other apps on very old versions of Ubuntu. Snaps allowed me to try out Debian and Fedora with minimal issues and easily integrate them into my dotfile manager with Ansible.

Spivak 7y ago
It's super super nice to have a real system for dealing with "pet" applications that users want to be updated outside of the distribution release cycle.
SahAssar 7y ago
That works with Flatpak/AppImage too though, right? For me Snap has always had that Canonical smell of not-invented-here, just like Mir, Unity and Upstart. All of those were eventually replaced with what a majority of similar linux distros settled on. I'm not saying it was wasted development or that nothing was learned but ultimately they joined the rest of the ecosystem instead of the ecosystem joining them. It seems that canonical does best when they embrace the ecosystem and not try to replace it.
- jraph 7y ago
  Upstart actually preceded systemd and was adopted by Fedora, Red Hat, openSUSE and ChromeOS. ChromeOS still seems to use it, interestingly. It probably paved the way to systemd and probably fulfilled a need that no other init system could. Ubuntu was also fast to switch to systemd when it appeared. Canonical cannot be accused of NIH for Upstart, it was a widely adopted clean init system at the time and made many distro's boot times great again. Service configuration files were also very easy and clean. Unity was a desktop environment that both was liked by many people and reused many components from Gnome, I don't really see a problem here. A point could be made for Mir.
- berkut 7y ago
  Just like with Upstart (which existed well before systemd did), Snap existed before Flatpak, and in fact existed in another form (Click) for two years before that. So it's wrong to say Canonical is guilty of NIH-syndrome with these two items, when their versions were out first. Whether the tech is any good is another matter.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]