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?
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?