I appreciate that they try, and as much as I dislike some of snap’s design choices I think it has a place. Flatpak appears to be the winner in this race however, and I feel like this is Unity all over. Just as the project gets good they abandon it for the prevailing winds. I’ve been told the snap server isn’t open source, which is a big concern?
Snap’s problem is kind of two-fold. One the one hand they keep their server closed source, because it’s heavily integrated into Canonical’s business infrastructure, and on the other hand they’re trying to use the Snap store as a way to make money through business customers. One of those ways is that if you want to publish a snap for your company or your personal devices, you have to either make it publicly available for everyone, or pay Canonical a metric fuckton of money to add your own “store” within the Snap store.
There are tons of free projects with open source clients and closed source servers (often with open implementations available), but the combination of “monetisation platform” and swapping out non-snap system components for snap components (i.e. Firefox, Chromium, LXC) really pisses off a lot of people.
I’m sure the patch to allow Snap to be reconfigured to use an alternative source URL from a config file somewhere is easy to add, but the problem is more with the intention to keep it the way it is.
One annoying example of Canonical’s unwillingness to adjust is the snap folder in your home directory. That’s snap, not Snap. All directories start with a capital letter, but not snap, and there’s no way to change it. You can’t add a period in front of the name to hide it, you can’t fix the capitalisation, you can’t move it to another location, you have to accept its location and name or remove snap entirely.
The client and most of Ubuntu is all open source so there’s absolutely no reason why someone wouldn’t be able to fix this, but Snap is full of such small and needlessly user-hostile limitations that don’t make a lot of sense and have often been fixed by Flatpak already. I know Flatpak can’t do some of the things Snap does, but I question how relevant use cases are for the complicated system interactions that make some of the more advanced Snap features available when looking at desktop users. Put this stuff in Ubuntu IoT and Ubuntu Core, that’s where it makes total sense, maybe even Ubuntu Server, but why stuff Ubuntu Desktop full of it?
Unlike desktop environments where there were equivalent alternatives to Unity, Flatpak isn’t an alternative to Snap that can deliver an equivalent solution. You can’t build an OS on top of Flatpak. This is why I think that if Snap makes the lives of Canonical developers easier, they’ll keep maintaining it. We’ll know if Ubuntu Core Desktop becomes a mainstream flavor or the default one. I think there is a commercial value of it in the enterprise world where tight control of the OS and upgrade robustness are needed. In this kind of a future Snap will have a long and productive life. If it ends up being used only for desktop apps which Flatpak covers, it may fall by the wayside as you suggested.
Absolutely, and I think that’s why snap has a future at all. Immutability is the future, as well as self-contained apps. We saw the explosive growth of Docker as indication that this was the way. If they can make their tooling as easy as a Dockerfile they will win just by reducing the work needed to support it.
I appreciate that they try, and as much as I dislike some of snap’s design choices I think it has a place. Flatpak appears to be the winner in this race however, and I feel like this is Unity all over. Just as the project gets good they abandon it for the prevailing winds. I’ve been told the snap server isn’t open source, which is a big concern?
Snap’s problem is kind of two-fold. One the one hand they keep their server closed source, because it’s heavily integrated into Canonical’s business infrastructure, and on the other hand they’re trying to use the Snap store as a way to make money through business customers. One of those ways is that if you want to publish a snap for your company or your personal devices, you have to either make it publicly available for everyone, or pay Canonical a metric fuckton of money to add your own “store” within the Snap store.
There are tons of free projects with open source clients and closed source servers (often with open implementations available), but the combination of “monetisation platform” and swapping out non-snap system components for snap components (i.e. Firefox, Chromium, LXC) really pisses off a lot of people.
I’m sure the patch to allow Snap to be reconfigured to use an alternative source URL from a config file somewhere is easy to add, but the problem is more with the intention to keep it the way it is.
One annoying example of Canonical’s unwillingness to adjust is the snap folder in your home directory. That’s snap, not Snap. All directories start with a capital letter, but not snap, and there’s no way to change it. You can’t add a period in front of the name to hide it, you can’t fix the capitalisation, you can’t move it to another location, you have to accept its location and name or remove snap entirely.
The client and most of Ubuntu is all open source so there’s absolutely no reason why someone wouldn’t be able to fix this, but Snap is full of such small and needlessly user-hostile limitations that don’t make a lot of sense and have often been fixed by Flatpak already. I know Flatpak can’t do some of the things Snap does, but I question how relevant use cases are for the complicated system interactions that make some of the more advanced Snap features available when looking at desktop users. Put this stuff in Ubuntu IoT and Ubuntu Core, that’s where it makes total sense, maybe even Ubuntu Server, but why stuff Ubuntu Desktop full of it?
Unlike desktop environments where there were equivalent alternatives to Unity, Flatpak isn’t an alternative to Snap that can deliver an equivalent solution. You can’t build an OS on top of Flatpak. This is why I think that if Snap makes the lives of Canonical developers easier, they’ll keep maintaining it. We’ll know if Ubuntu Core Desktop becomes a mainstream flavor or the default one. I think there is a commercial value of it in the enterprise world where tight control of the OS and upgrade robustness are needed. In this kind of a future Snap will have a long and productive life. If it ends up being used only for desktop apps which Flatpak covers, it may fall by the wayside as you suggested.
Absolutely, and I think that’s why snap has a future at all. Immutability is the future, as well as self-contained apps. We saw the explosive growth of Docker as indication that this was the way. If they can make their tooling as easy as a Dockerfile they will win just by reducing the work needed to support it.