237
I respect people who don't like snaps, but Canonical will not abandon a successful project
(slrpnk.net)
this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
237 points (84.5% liked)
linuxmemes
21160 readers
1638 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
- LemmyMemes: Memes
- LemmyShitpost: Anything and everything goes.
- RISA: Star Trek memes and shitposts
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry will not be tolerated.
- These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudoin Windows. - No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
Snap doesn't really even have as many applications packaged as people think. Snap's package count is often touted as being much higher than Flatpak's. However, this is misleading, as Snap allows the inclusion of many command-line interface (CLI) only packages that aren't well-suited for containerization.
The inclusion of these CLI-only packages drastically inflates Snap's overall package count, while Flatpak does not include as many standalone CLI tools.
Furthermore, packaging CLI tools as Snap or Flatpak packages doesn't really make much sense. A huge amount of CLI tools were never intended to be used inside a containerized environment like Snap. As a result, there will likely be compatibility issues and unsupported edge cases.
Additionally, there are already established universal packaging standards for CLI tools, such as Nix and Homebrew. These packaging systems are better suited for distributing standalone CLI applications compared to containerized formats like Snap and Flatpak.