alt Hacker NewsTheir insistence on Snap over Flatpak is just confusing the ecosystem, not helping it. I get it's a lock-in thing for them (Snap is locked to Canonical's proprietary store and only allows Ubuntu runtimes) but that's a harmful thing to do.
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Apps are so messy on Linux. I get some software from apt, flatpak, snap, appimage files, and pip. I wish that at least about 3 of these delivery systems would get merged and depreciated. It was honestly easier to figure this stuff out when it was just .deb files and nothing else.
Yeah I think it's just a way to try and extract some money from the ecosystem.
But many people will never pay for Linux and it's even causing people to move away (eg to Mint which removes snap)
Perhaps it makes sense in the enterprise market though. They're always trying to push launchpad to us at work and I'm sure this will integrate with snap. But launchpad doesn't work for us because it only works with Ubuntu. So it's just a non starter for us, we have more distros to support. Sure Ubuntu is the biggest in our environment but we want a single pane of glass for everything. More similarities between distros would make that a lot easier.
I don't understand why people are not more upset at that attempt.
I don't per se mind using snaps instead of flatpaks (though I do prefer the latter). What bothers me is that Canonical replaced Firefox in their apt repos with a fake package that installs the snap version of the app. If I choose to install via apt, it's because I want the standard version of the app, and I don't appreciate bait and switch nonsense trying to push snap usage. That was when I lost interest in using Ubuntu, I don't want my OS trying to override my decisions.