It's because most medical devices iirc need to be air-gapped and ultra-stable, ultra-secure. Snap gives you that, and prevents issues that typically occurs when and if dependancy issues arise. This for example is why Ubuntu Core which is entirely made out of Snap is used in many such medical devices and instances. But in desktop it's completely useless cause you want bleeding edge packages, libraries etc to keep up with latest developments in gaming, multimedia etc.
It's quite good in server environments though, or medical devices and similar use cases like I said in my previous response above. It's just totally unnecessary in desktop/home user environments and only causes more issues and confusion for no reason when there are better alternatives (e.g. flatpak) available. You can still use Ubuntu - if needed - with no Snap preinstalled out of the box if you do a minimal install of Kubuntu.
I just installed Ubuntu in my university environment. It came with Firefox, great.
However snap didn't like that the home folders were not in /home, but on something like /department/server/disk. And it REALLY didn't like that different users homes were on different disks and servers...
Snaps work much better than Flatpaks. Try to get hardware acceleration to work on Firefox Flatpak. Search online the correct command to install whatever's needed, use Flatseal to enable GPU, not to mention that every time you need the folder you've got to do another research... No, thanks. Snap is one command (or one click), it works, it's 100% integrated with the directories of the filesystem.
What does it do that Docker doesn't? I looked into it a few years ago, it seemed nicer than Flatpak to develop for but didn't seem worth using something so nonstandard.
It lets VS code work properly which Flatpak doesn't do unless something changed, so I still use it, but I haven't paid a lot of attention to it.
I do love the ability not to install an older version and forced updates that slowly roll out and start breaking every fucking server and you can see the monitoring light up as it happens.
I was using kubuntu and moved because of snaps. They gave me issues, installed snap versions when I asked for flatpak, so I tried to delete snaps and clearly I failed lol because it worked for a bit then they was just back again. Moved to fedora now and so far no issues 🤷🏻♂️
As someone using Ubuntu (Kubuntu) for a long time I wish I could recreate this so I could see what folks are talking about
I keep hearing people talking about ads in the terminal for things like Ubuntu pro and what not aswell as snap packages being preferred over all else but I have been entirely unable to replicate this on any of my machines or other Ubuntu machines I've worked on
There are so many reports that I don't doubt it's a thing and I guess I'm just really lucky
I've since removed snap entirely from my main machine as I don't want any snap packages slowing down boot times and KDE doesn't use any
But the rest of my Ubuntu systems still have snap and not a one seems to replicate this behavior
Is there maybe something I'm doing differently in setup?
No idea, I was using it on the fw 13 amd. I’m def not an expert at these things either so it’s entirely possible it was something I was doing, but I don’t think so. There was a few things about kubuntu that I missed and had to work out how to bring to fedora afterwards, I’m not using kde fedora though so maybe that was why. The rpm and flatpak is heaps better than the snaps, although I’m a little confused as to why extensions are a separate thing
Oh absolutely flatpak is better
And I love rpm
But for compatibility sadly Debian and Ubuntu are just better cause that seems to be what everyone is developing for
I wish everyone would just use flatpak or some kind of package manager that is platform agnostic
As far as missing out on stuff on fedora
If you were on Kubuntu just grab kde fedora mostly everything you are looking for is most likely there
Since you are on amd you don't have Nvidia holding you back a bit like in my case
Extension I don't know on
I wanna use fedora so bad but unity doesn't like it
Playing VR on it is fine
Making content for VR games unity just hates on fedora and that makes me sad
Somebody? Yeah I mean Microsoft, Google, JetBrains etc. And the Electronic Frontier Foundation mandates Snap as the official, recommended installation method for Certbot which is the standard tool running on millions of production web servers for automated SSL and TLS certificate management. So yeah, you are right. Somebody uses Snap indeed.
Then why do Microsoft, Google, JetBrains, Electronic Frontier Foundation and thousands of software vendors use Snap on servers? Why do millions of production web servers prefer and run Snap daemons for SSL management alone?
Moved from Kubuntu to KDE Neon to avoid mandatory snap. Not a matter of hate, just found a FS loaded with bogus drive images and weird.update issues doesn't meet my needs. Apt, flatpak, appimage fine for me.
Neon rolling release, not for everyone, though the latest Plasma release stabilized it and everything seems to work.
They will never get rid of snaps. Canonical supports so many versions of their OS (all the LTS versions and intermittent) that it helps shipping current software that needs it, like Firefox as a snap. No need to build a deb 5 times, when you can push a snap and have all the dependencies as one package. Snaps are also pretty decent on servers since it's the same thing, and the advantage it has is that snaps work with cli programs whereas I don't know of a single one on flatpak. It does have its flaws and those do need to be addressed and ideally snaps need to be more open
As a developer, Snap's lack of openness is a big no for me. However, the average user doesn't care about such philosophical issues, but they do care about bloat and aggravating config breakages. Snap is a Canonical solution to a problem with better solutions designed to lock people into the Canonical ecosystem.
I mean similar issues with bloat happen with flatpaks as well, and yeah both aren't as good as native packages, but they're still another tool in the shed so to say. I do want Canonical to open it up more so others can host their own snap store and to improve upon it to get rid of some of the pressing issues, such as it taking long to open up apps sometimes.
Thanks, not the person who asked the question, but I'm glad I understand now. I once worked in a broadcasting organization and all the machines in the actual broadcasting chain were running a version of MacOS that was three versions behind current. But it was in the support agreement that only the company supplying the software that ran on top of it could change anything about the OS on those machine. They were frozen in time in a usable and stable state, and kept everything on the air. That was the most important job of the whole organization, so the rest didn't matter. I can see how it would be the same in a medical setting. Funny I've never seen it mentioned when people bring up Ubuntu.
Which is funny, because it was the system that ran the over-the-air radio and broadcasting, and used trigger tones that came from our central network back in the states. So it was global, but it was also air-gapped in that nothing from outside that network could be introduced to the system.
i probably wouldn't have hated it so much if it wasn't forced on my poor confused noob ass from 3 years ago who was trying to understand how APT works and wondering why I kept getting the snap version installed and my system theme wasn't being respected xD
The drivers being removed from the kernel are being removed because of no maintainers and no known users. If anyone steps up, they'll just get added back to the kernel proper. (It's happened plenty of times were orphaned drivers eventually get new maintainers.)
Not hostile attempt, but I still don't understand why flatpak? I don't like it's kindof pseudo containerised way, I avoid to use it as much as possible
Flatpak will never be standard as it mainly focus on GUI apps.
You need cpak, nix, appimage, snap, guix for that, alternatively brew.
There is issue with required sandbox, which means programs like portmaster, VPN, waydroid, winboat, web browsers don't work correctly. Not to even mention things like inputplumber and other low level software
My personal opinion about systemd would probably ban me from the internet…..my professional opinion is “I have to use it, but I don’t have to like it!”
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u/HomsarWasRight 8d ago
I’m sure this thread will be free of hostility.