this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2023
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51
Ubuntu Flavors Will Stop Using Flatpak (www.omgubuntu.co.uk)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
18 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

In a surprise move, Ubuntu developers have agreed to stop shipping Flatpak, preinstalled Flatpak apps, and any plugins needed to install Flatpak apps through a GUI software tool in the default package set across all eight of Ubuntu’s official flavors, as of the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 release.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I have said and will keep saying this, Snap continues to be one of the worst things Canonical has tried to pass off as "production ready" at least in recent times, and every time they push more for it makes me consider them even more of an untrustworthy distro vendor.

My personal experience with it is that I had to nuke it off the computers I maintain last time we updated Ubuntu to the new release (unfortunately I don't control what OS we're using, otherwise Ubuntu would have been gone faster than you could say "Snap"), because these computers have user homes on a network drive, which isn't under /home, and snap just flat out refuses to work when that is the case.

It wouldn't even be such a problem if they hadn't removed Firefox among other things from their repositories, but as it is right now, there's no way to run Firefox on Ubuntu without mucking around with PPAs if your user home is not under /home. This bug about that has been open for 7 years!

That said, I think this is fine considering Flatpak is still going to be available in the repositories, just not installed by default. I'm much more a fan of "install what you need", anyway. (But then again, that's not the style of distro Ubuntu wants to go for.)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm okay technically with Snap, and I appreciate that it can do CLI programs as well which Flatpak can't (to my knowledge. My issue with it is that Canonical has dug their feet in on making their store the default and only package source for everyone. It's clear to me that they want to be the gatekeepers of software on Linux.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah, it definitely does CLI applications better, I think Oracle uses it for some of their system monitoring services on Oracle Cloud for example. At least the snap issue I linked is also still open unlike the issue for better CLI handling for Flatpak which was closed without being fixed and makes the guy who closed it look like an arrogant asshole.

To be honest I don't really like either of these because they both have big flaws like that, and of the three major "standalone app formats" I prefer AppImage the most simply because I can just download those without needing to install some other daemon first.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

@2xsaiko Was this in response to my response to someone asking about new distros? New to Mastodon!

Haven't noticed the snaps much, but when I have, it was something weird that made me think it probably wouldn't have happened if I hadn't installed the snap... probably my aversion to learning something new and unrelated. I absolutely hated systemd when it first got pushed by Redhat, but I've come around.

Yeah, not liking the tone of that developer. Maybe needs an LLM-bedside-coprocessor. ;)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

@[email protected] It's in response to this comment. Looks like Mastodon doesn't really deal well with Lemmy comment threads (and I think I have to explicitly tag you for you to see it?) :P

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

@winnie snap is not so mature as flatpaks yet. Dont know if its really a nice descision.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago (2 children)

No, it's not nice decision. It's more political decision, to force Ubuntu's own solution instead of alternative.

(I'm wondering if you would be notified for reply in mastodon?)

[–] marmalade 3 points 2 years ago

Business as usual considering their history of Unity and Mir, so.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

@winnie @jcbritobr thats usually the case for mastodon when someone replies to your post.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah. But Lemmy doesn't add @username to it's replies.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

@winnie
It shouldn't matter. Mastodon users should get notified when you reply to their post even though they aren't tagged in it.

At least that's the case for me on Friendica but I remember the same behaviour from back when I used Mastodon.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Wait, how did you view this post via Mastodon? I know both Lemmy and Mastodon use ActivityPub but the UX and urlpatterns are quite different and client-specific. What is the format of the link you used to view this?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

I also demand answers. Should I be able to see Mastodon posts via my Lemmy/wefwef?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

This is bizarre. Snap has improved a tiny bit over time, but it continues to not be that great. Meanwhile, flatpak is miles ahead. Things are generally just smoother and less annoying, even when Snap is working as intended.

Personal anecdote: I was having no end of trouble with Inkscape, it was just not working, very unreliable, all sorts of very odd issues. It got worse and worse over time to the point where it didn't even seem to understand paths to open files anymore, if it even felt like opening that day. I tried reinstalling, clearing the config, all sorts of things. I suspected maybe the version of Inkscape Snap was giving me might have a bug in it so I was looking around for alternative ways to install an older version and then for some reason I tried Flatpak. It was like some kind of magic. Totally night and day. All of a sudden Inkscape had absolutely none of the issues that the Snap version had. It just worked. After that I realized that it hadn't been a bug in that version of Inkscape at all, it was just Snap.

I haven't had any issues with any other Snaps, but that incident really opened my eyes to just how bad things can get if a program isn't packaged correctly.

[–] sneakyninjapants 3 points 2 years ago

In a surprise move

No surprise to me. Canonical has been headed down this path since they started losing popularity parity with flatpak. Seems like they're pushing for vendor lock-in.

[–] sophia 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Omg why?? It just gets worse.

[–] transientpunk 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

It's because Canonical has a vested interest in pushing the solution that they spent money developing.

As much as I appreciate everything that Canonical has done for Linux, this is the problem with trusting for-profit companies in the open source realm. Profit is their motivator. They don't care that flatpak has better performance than snap, they just know they spent money developing snap, so they have to force it onto their users, despite it being the inferior tech.

[–] sharkfucker420 1 points 2 years ago

Can anyone explain to me what the benefits of flatpak are? I've never used it but I hear a lot about it