I have such mixed feelings about snap. Logistically it's pretty despicable, and I've heard no shortage of horror stories about shops getting footed a bill for fairly innocuous usage of it. At the same time though, it's probably the best sandboxed app delivery system we have. It literally "just works" wherever I use it. I refuse to install it on any of my personal systems (for much the same reasons I'll never use Flatpak), but my experience with it during both desktop and server use has been... nearly flawless. The only time I've had issues is when a download stalls out and I need to refresh the daemon. Besides that, it's frustratingly good.
I'll take a native package any day of the week, but snap is annoyingly competent at what it does. Particularly for server use: it almost scares me how little I notice the seams...
1. It's heavy. The sandbox performance is much, much slower than running software natively, and it's especially noticeable on older hardware. Newer hardware still has high latency when running things like games or even simple UIs through it. The only time I've seen screen tearing in a hardware-accelerated app is when I was using it in Flatpak.
2. It doesn't respect my desktop settings, environment variables or XDG options.
3. It's overly redundant. Packaging an entire system with your application is overkill, Nix and Guix are able to achieve better stability/consistency with less overhead and native binaries. Nobody should be forced to install a second system on top of their current one just to run an app.
4. Canonical:snap::GNOME:Flatpak. I greatly disagree with a lot of the decisions being made on Flatpak's development, but none of the maintainers will even hold discussions with you about the philosophy of the package manager. It's typical "my way or the highway" GNOME behavior.
5. It's non-portable. If we're sandboxing stuff anyways, why can't we just use portable binaries? I know it's because of their dynamic linking, but it's pretty unnecessary if they're going install software you already run natively a second time. Just go all-in or don't go at all. AppImage gets this right.
6. Their sandboxing model is genuinely awful. So many apps are misconfigured or broken out of the box, and it makes for a terrible user experience. Furthermore, many Flatpaks ship with carte-blanche filesystem access anyways, so it's hard to take their security argument seriously. Portals are dumb. Their permissions are neat, but also nothing new. Basically just a worse firejail.
There's a few more, but those are my biggest gripes. Native packaging with native sandboxing solves all of these complaints.
“but none of the maintainers will even hold discussions with you about the philosophy of the package manager”
Or maybe it is because they do not want to deal with people who have a history of trolling and no interest in changing their opinions.
But seriously, GNOME gets piled on all the time as the worst, yet somehow remains quite popular. Haters gonna hate and there is a point where ignoring them is the best course of action.
6 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 24.7 ms ] threadI'll take a native package any day of the week, but snap is annoyingly competent at what it does. Particularly for server use: it almost scares me how little I notice the seams...
Why won't you use Flatpak?
1. It's heavy. The sandbox performance is much, much slower than running software natively, and it's especially noticeable on older hardware. Newer hardware still has high latency when running things like games or even simple UIs through it. The only time I've seen screen tearing in a hardware-accelerated app is when I was using it in Flatpak.
2. It doesn't respect my desktop settings, environment variables or XDG options.
3. It's overly redundant. Packaging an entire system with your application is overkill, Nix and Guix are able to achieve better stability/consistency with less overhead and native binaries. Nobody should be forced to install a second system on top of their current one just to run an app.
4. Canonical:snap::GNOME:Flatpak. I greatly disagree with a lot of the decisions being made on Flatpak's development, but none of the maintainers will even hold discussions with you about the philosophy of the package manager. It's typical "my way or the highway" GNOME behavior.
5. It's non-portable. If we're sandboxing stuff anyways, why can't we just use portable binaries? I know it's because of their dynamic linking, but it's pretty unnecessary if they're going install software you already run natively a second time. Just go all-in or don't go at all. AppImage gets this right.
6. Their sandboxing model is genuinely awful. So many apps are misconfigured or broken out of the box, and it makes for a terrible user experience. Furthermore, many Flatpaks ship with carte-blanche filesystem access anyways, so it's hard to take their security argument seriously. Portals are dumb. Their permissions are neat, but also nothing new. Basically just a worse firejail.
There's a few more, but those are my biggest gripes. Native packaging with native sandboxing solves all of these complaints.
Or maybe it is because they do not want to deal with people who have a history of trolling and no interest in changing their opinions.
But seriously, GNOME gets piled on all the time as the worst, yet somehow remains quite popular. Haters gonna hate and there is a point where ignoring them is the best course of action.
(edit: i know neon is ubuntu lts based!)