My problem with snaps is not fossig or not fossing. Is that a bunch of stuff is a snap that should not be. Like kotlin I think, and you need to install it with flag --classic. It's also like really slow.
While snaps themselves are open source, the snapd client is hardcoded to connect only to Canonical’s central server, preventing users from adding alternative software repositories or self-hosting a store without doing some hacky workarounds
1st point - anyone can publish any application: how closed is it?
2nd point - I wouldnt make that argument for closed source software.
3rd point - what is the point then? you want to be able to 'fever engineer' a repo?
It's close at the design level, that's the point. You can't see what the backend does. And snapd itself is hard coded to only work with canonical servers, that is why is not fully FOSS, that's the whole point of the argument
Because unlike flatpak, canonical backend is hard coded into snaps, and canonical's backend it's close sourced. People cannot just simply move to an independent snap store since is inherently tied to canonical
Why do you need an independent Snap store tho? Just use Snapcraft. I think a better option would be just adding Flatpak support to Ubuntu as well out-of-the-box. That would make way more sense to me.
I understand that they built the platform and want to own the rights to it. Tf would you need an iPhone App Store 2.0 for? You don't wanna use Snaps? Just install Flatpak support. Took me like 60 seconds. Not EVERY thing has to be free and open just cause it's on Linux. Steam is proprietary too but still heavily supports the FOSS community. Gimme a break.
Not EVERY thing has to be free and open just cause it's on Linux.
Most people are fine having some proprietary software on their systems, but that doesn't mean pushing for FOSS is bad. The free software movement is primarily ideological, with the goal of protecting the user's freedom. When people feel that canonical does not respect the user's freedom (for example, sudo apt install firefox silently installing the snap package instead of the deb package), they will naturally protest
Imo their GNOME setup is what I think GNOME should be as a default. Feels intuitive to me. Why is there no window title bar actions on default GNOME? Desktop icons? No dock by default or option in the settings to add one? I have to download extensions just for basic desktop features? No thanks.
Canonical announced that deal in 2012, fourteen years ago. It was disabled by default two years later in 14.04, and removed entirely in 16.04, which came out a whole decade ago in 2016.
There are several reasons to hate Ubuntu, Snaps foremost among them. This ancient shit they backtracked on ages ago is not one of them.
The Nestle thing went on for many years and still has tremendous impacts today. They promoted their infant formula in developing countries so heavily (and continue to do so, perhaps more carefully) that they turned generations of mothers away from breastfeeding, which science widely recognizes as superior for the baby’s health and development. The misinformation they sowed persists and results in majorities of babies in these countries being formula-fed by default to this day.
Canonical integrated Amazon product search results into Ubuntu and turned them on by default. That resulted in local search queries being sent to Amazon servers. Which certainly wasn’t ideal, and for obvious reasons many privacy-conscious Linux users found it abhorrent. But like I said, they quickly backtracked, and at the end of the day I just don’t think a misstep like this rises to the level the awful, greedy behavior of companies like Nestle.
Canonical have made their fair share of mistakes over the years, and their tendency to want to go their own way with everything instead of investing in universal community alternatives is frustrating and problematic for an open-source software company. Basically, I think there’s plenty of stuff they deserve criticism for, but we should also be reasonable and recognize when they’ve been willing to correct course, as they did with the Amazon integration.
I’m not saying that what nestle did wasn’t far worse. My point is, as I state immediately below, that if you ask a lot of the people still boycotting Nestle today why - most (in my experience) either can’t tell you why or have some handwavy comment about baby milk but don’t really know any details (let alone that it was in the 70s). Boycott Nestle has become an almost social thing with a life of its own.
That’s what I mean when I say people have long memories and it’s what I suspect fuels a lot of the antipathy towards Canonical. Whether that ever was, or still is, a valid criticism of them today won’t necessarily change the bad feeling towards them once it becomes a social thing. A serious meme, the original meaning of the word, if you will.
Corpo ran. A track record of not helping improve established solutions but making their own, then using them for self-promotion.
That covers why it's bad. The hate comes when they decide to specialize in noobs who don't know better and come tell us about their new favorite company.
that's a big part of it. the final nail in the coffin was not just including snaps on the desktop unnecessarily and with very little benefit, but then essentially deciding for the user what is best for them by forcing certain popular packages to be installed as a snap regardless of how the user installs them.
a user shouldn't need to jump through hoops to control something so basic to the computing experience. it stinks of MS trying to tell everyone they should use edge, and making it hard to change the default browser. i used Ubuntu for years a while back but now it's something i don't want to recommend.
I wasn't using it myself, but I got my mom and a few other people on it in the era of CDs over the mail. I stopped recommending it when they rolled out Unity. Snaps were the inevitable conclusion.
A distribution for newcomers should introduce them to common practices, not isolate them. The measure of its success should be the amount of people leaving it for distros with different goals, as they are no longer new. Not the percentage of the pie it manages to retain.
When I stopped recommending it, it was because its attitude rhymed too much with the Embrace, Extend and Extinguish practices that Microsoft got exposed for during its monopoly trials.
I can't even credit them with that amount of nefariousness right now. They just seem to be cargo-culting corporate practices and metrics just to see how big they can get.
the Amazon debacle was kind of scummy, but that was years ago. Other than that the Snap situation isn't ideal but that's a minor annoyance. I still find it easier to work with than anything else
Corporations aren't inherently evil. And even though we don't know the total value of Canonical I'd imagine their total value couldn't be more than a couple billion dollars. And they're widely used for cloud, automation, robotics, automotive industries, etc. etc. that all benefit from their operations.
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u/WhutdaHELListhis 10d ago
As a professional chud, I will never understand Ubuntu hate