It may surprise you to see how many Debian contributors are doing so on Canonical’s payroll.

Isn’t Pop OS just System76’s spin on Ubuntu?

That link includes a whole lot of old things as well as blog posts about how they sped up the performance of the Firefox snap, after which there doesn’t seem to be much, if any, further evidence of the snap being slow.

The claim that snaps are a Canonical NIH thing is falsified by those two facts. Even if Canonical said “okay, we’ll distribute desktop apps with Flatpak,” that wouldn’t affect the vast majority of their ongoing effort for snaps, which are related to things that Flatpak simply doesn’t do. Instead, they’d have the separate work of making the moving target of flatpaks work with their snap-based systems such as Ubuntu Core while still having to fully maintain that snap based ecosystem for the enterprise customers who use it for things that Flatpak simply doesn’t do.

Good thing grep exists!

I don’t like snaps because it’s just another Canonical NIH thing. Everyone else agreed on flatpak which seems to have a good design with portals and all and being fully open.

Snaps both predate flatpak and do things that Flatpaks are not designed to do.

Canonical have also been a part of the desktop portals standard for a very long time, as they’ve been a part of how snaps do things.

Are they though? They were at one point, but even then I’ve not seen comparative slowness compared to the equivalent Flatpaks. In some cases I’ve seen them be slow compared to native packages, but even that seems to have all but disappeared for me.

I don’t rub my non-Britishness on them.

Americans cannot relate to this.

Flatpak has long had the ability to dump the contents of a snap into it, because snaps had already solved many of the build issues flatpaks were struggling with and they used similar runtimes for their sandboxing. It’s also a convenient way to convert apps over, since many apps got packaged as snaps before flatpak was really usable.

It depends what you’re trying to accomplish. For me, having the ability to essentially use Lego to put together my system is one of the great features of both snap and nix that Flatpak doesn’t cover.

There are plenty of use cases that snap provides that flatpak doesn’t - they only compete in a subset of snap’s functionality. For example, flatpak does not (and is not designed to) provide a way to use it to distribute kernels or system services.

That is the behaviour that’s built for when an upgrade through a “classic” package manager (e.g. apt, dnf) updates Firefox while it’s still running. The only way I can think of that you’d get that with a snap is if you’re intentionally bypassing the confinement (e.g. by running /snap/firefox/current/usr/lib/firefox/firefox directly, which can also massively mess with other things since Firefox won’t be running in the core22 environment it expects).

If you’re using the snap as expected (e.g. opening the .desktop file in /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/, running /snap/bin/firefox or running snap run firefox), snapd won’t replace /snap/firefox/current until you no longer have any processes from that snap running. Instead you’ll get a desktop notification to close and restart Firefox to update it, and two weeks to either do so or to run snap refresh --hold firefox to prevent the update (or something like snap refresh --hold=6w firefox to hold the refresh for 6 weeks). Depending on what graphical updater you have, you may also have the ability to hold the update through that updater.

Are you sure you’re running the Firefox snap? Because that sounds pretty much precisely like the expected behaviour if someone had gone to lengths to avoid using the snap.

The updates download in the background and will install when you exit the snapped app. If you really don’t want automatic updates, you can run snap refresh --hold to hold all automatic updates or add a snap name to hold updates for that snap.

A built-in way to have services running (which is why openprinting can make a snap of CUPS but AFAICT can’t make a Flatpak).

A few off the top of my head:

• Every time I try it I have installation issues, across a wide variety of hardware. (Newbies have also reported to me that “Linux can’t even install” after trying Mint - when I sit them down with a Kubuntu install on the same machine it tends to go flawlessly)
• Cinnamon seems to have stability issues (this is one of the more common things I’ve had now ie friends complain about and ask for help with)
• the blocking of snapd in the repos and the way it’s done can be pretty confusing to newbies when they click a “get it on the snap store” button and things just fall apart. (I also think their blocking of snapd itself is fairly user hostile, but the fact that the UX around it is so bad is also a problem)
• On the subject of blocking packages in the repos - their own packages seem to have file conflicts with the Ubuntu repos they use but don’t put the relevant “Conflicts” lines in their deb metadata, which I’ve seen cause conflicts for newbies that break apt. (KDE Neon does a much better job of taking care of this IMO, but I certainly don’t view it as a beginner friendly distro either)
• The lack of a Plasma version is a major downside to me. (Random aside: I once had a newbie ask me how she could get the pretty version of Linux I had because hers was so ugly - she was running stock Mint and I was on Fedora’s KDE spin)

Yeah, I really don’t get why so many people call Mint good for beginners. There are so many reasons it’s not, yet it has this incredibly vocal crowd who insist it’s so fantastic.

I’m not here to change your mind, but man… Mint and Manjaro are not great introductions to Linux IMO.

Well yeah. I had all sorts of mental health problems I was struggling to deal with, but now I’m struggling to make the perfect desktop configuration instead.

I generally use avocado and horseradish that I dye green for some reason.

Better to put thin slices of raw fish on it.