The title is a quote from Mastodon. I’ve always seen dislike towards snap so I was taken back when I saw this stance. The person who wrote this was referring to Tuxedo Laptops.
What are your thoughts on this?
EDIT:
Here’s the original comment: https://mastodon.social/@popey/112591863166141029
EDIT 2:
Some clarification for those accusing me of not following the thread or being disingenuous.
Didn’t bother to follow the thread?
I posted my question here before this particular response from the OP. I asked the question on Lemmy out of interest and wanting to get a wider perspective. I also engaged with the OP on the thread so that I can get their perspective on their stance.
Listen, I don’t even like Flatpaks, but at least they’re multi-platform and non-proprietary.
But the original poster is probably of the opinion that “pro-consumer” means something that “just works”, and if it’s a walled garden, so what?
“Why is there barbed wire at the top of that wall?” “Don’t worry about it.”
That would be a somewhat valid argument if Snaps “just worked” any better than Flatpaks. That has not been my experience.
Given the choice between an open standard and a proprietary one, the proprietary one damn well better have meaningful technological advantages. I don’t see that with Snaps. All I see is a company pouring effort into a system whose only value is that they are pouring effort into it. They should put that effort into something better.
Granted, it’s been a few years since I used Ubuntu and Snaps. Perhaps things have improved. It was nothing but headaches for me. A curse upon whoever decided to package apps that obviously require full file system access as Snaps. “User-friendly”, indeed.
From an enterprise/server perspective, when what you’re really paying for is first-party support, I guess Snaps make more sense. But again, that effort could be put toward something more useful.
I keep expecting them to die like Unity DE
Genuinely curious: what don’t you like about flatpaks?
I find that flatpaks are quite awesome, because you can have any distro, while all apps continue to work (but I’m also not a dev or anything, so don’t know about that side of the story).
Duplication of resources mainly. Bloat upon bloat. Worse, a Flatpak can ignore things that it probably should use on the system, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
Don’t get me wrong, there are supposed “bare metal” installs that duplicate all sorts of things too, and I don’t like it when that happens either. Steam, for example, keeps at least one extra copy of itself as well as a bunch of other things.
And there’s that Flatpaks an entirely different ecosystem that require their own set of updates.
I get it. I understand there are benefits. Doesn’t mean I like it.
Not to mention they are optional and not a replacement for something that worked fine.