It’s not that successful if the userbase hates it and would rather use a competitor.
For me it was a successful deterrent. Debian bookworm has been wonderful.
Yeah I love it, Debian feels like opening a featureless gray box that just says “OS” on the front. Add whatever you want. A blank canvas. It’s as close to “generic” Linux as you can get.
I installed mint on my second PC, and it’s great. I feel like migrating my main, but I’m not sure it would go smoothly. I’ve had a lot of issues with my four months old Ubuntu install, lately the keyboard is nonfunctional at the login screen about half the time. Snaps are another reason making me want to leave it behind.
I found out I could dual boot Linux at work and went right for Mint. I think it’s great. It’s a nice pragmatic choice for people like me who love using Linux and are constantly in a bash prompt, but who don’t want to build up a system from scratch and who are fine not running the very latest.
It’s even downstream from some of the most popular distros out there, but without Canonical’s controversial shit.
I mean I used to used to use Ubuntu for my server now I use Debian cos fuck snaps.
Ow! My brain!
The other day I tested Ubuntu just to see if it had gotten any better. It has become worse.
So I didn’t realize that the snaps logo is an origami bird.
“It was like a piece of self-opening origami, or a rosebud blooming into a rose in just a few seconds. Where just a few moments earlier there had been a smoothly curved black disk, there was now a bird. A bird, hovering there.” - Douglas Adams, describing the Hitchhiker’s Guide, Mk. II, from Mostly Harmless.
A bit on the nose there, Canonical.
successful project
That is a very biased claim. It’s like saying that the PS5 is the most successful gaming platform because God Of War: Ragnarök and Ghost Of Tsushima players prefer it over Xbox and PC.
Did they say it’s the most successful project? Because Sony saying that the PS5 is a successful platform because players prefer it over other options doesn’t seem biased at all. It’s just an objective statement of fact
If you go to snapcraft.io, you can see snap being installed on many other distributions other than Ubuntu. It will not show you the exact numbers, but people willingly install it on their machines. I think that’s successful.
I don’t think “there exists an unknown number of non-Ubuntu machines with snap installed” is a valid metric when the general sentiment seems to be apathy. It’s popular for the same reason Internet Explorer was popular – it’s forcibly installed with the default OS.
If the numbers were favorable, Canonical would release them.
What is the “general sentiment” tho? Sure, on Lemmy and Reddit communities I usually see people hate Snaps, but that’s just a few thousands of people. Another metric of success could be developers maintaining their software as snaps. You will find that quite a lot of them do so.
I said “apathy”, not “negative”. The people who dislike snap have likely moved to other distributions, and I don’t see any widespread praise considering Ubuntu’s market share within the Linux ecosystem, so the most likely answer is that people either don’t know or don’t care about snap.
Whether or not an application is packaged as a snap is also a poor indication. Most of the software used in Ubuntu still comes from an APT repo, mostly official or sometimes a PPA. Many developers distribute their software exclusively as flatpaks, appimages, or binaries. Shit, Valve even recommends against using the snap version of Steam. By using your standard, snap would be considered an abject failure.
It’s not successful though. Like, maybe if your measure of success is that it’s usable, sure. But no other OSes have adopted it. Not even Ubuntu’s downstream OSes like Mint or Pop_OS!.
Users don’t like it, vendors don’t like it, other OS maintainers don’t like it. I’m not sure why that would be considered successful.
Correct me if I’m wrong but Ubuntu is the mostly used Linux desktop OS out there so I wouldn’t call it unsuccessful.
Edit : I’m an idiot I can’t read snaps are not successful Ubuntu is
Hm. And you’d give Snaps the credit for that?
I don’t mind Snaps in a vacuum, but the unforgivable thing is that they messed with the package repo so that instead of installing a deb package as I intended, it installs a Snap stub which I did not want. If Canonical hadn’t forced them on users in that way, I’d have been fine with them.
Instead, back to Debian I went (sorry I ever left, actually)
Personally, I use Debian and gravitate towards flat paks, but I’m starting to question whether this is just one of those hills Linux users arbitrarily choose to die on a la systemd/wayland? I suppose one of the advantages of an opinionated OS is a vast array of opinions
It’s much worse.
The snap store is proprietary.
I’d be curious to see some statistics on how many Ubuntu users removed snaps vs how many haven’t changed the default.
I’d bet most ubuntu user don’t know the difference between snap and deb, tho.
The one app I can’t stand as a snap is firefox, it took a minute to navigate to the first webpage every time I start up. The rest are or more less fine I think, but flatpak meets my needs for most other applications.
Also command line tools are terrible as snaps. And the worst part is you have no idea why they won’t work. It doesn’t tell you that snap is the problem. It just doesn’t work.
It look me about two hours to realize that snap was the problem when I was trying to run Mastodon in a Docker container. That was the last straw before I moved to Fedora.
Snap can’t read anything outside of the
/homedirectory, and there’s no way to fix that except changing the source code and recompiling it.
I don’t really see a problem with a snaps/flatpaks as long as they are not on application I use every day.
But maybe it is easier if we have one standard instead of two.
Multiple standards are good, initially. Multiple visions and approaches can get tested. The best hopefully displaced the rest, whilst picking up all the other good ideas.
If there was only one standard we would get stuck with snaps with no alternatives.
snaps are a proprietary vendor-locked format, the only redeeming quality is being able to run them in cli (once Flatpak get that too, there is no valid reason for snaps to exist).
I just find it midly infuriating (if that even is a thing, meaning I hate it but it’s not that significant for me to distro hop on my work laptop) to have two “universal” package formats on my system with Canonical shoving the objectively worse one (from a free/libre pov) down my throat…
What utter BS. Stop spreading FUD from others. A simple search would find the source code https://github.com/snapcore/
Snaps are open source, including the store.
