this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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the thing people dislike about that is that you're silently moved from an open system to a closed-source one.
Debian's .deb hosting is completely open and you can host your own repository from which anyone can pull packages just by adding it to the apt config. fedora, suse, arch, same thing.
only Canonical can host snaps, and they're not telling people how the hosting works. KDE seems to upload their packages to the snap store for Neon, judging from their page.
also, crucially, canonical are not the ones doing the maintenance for those apt packages. the debian team does that.
Yeah. I didn't realize I had fallen for it until I tried to automate a system rebuild, and discovered that a bunch of the
snapback end seems to be closed and proprietary.And a lot of it for no reason. Reasonable
aptandbflatpakalternates existed, but Canonical steered me to their closed repackaged versions.While Canonical's particular snap store implementation is closed source, all of the client software as well as the store API are open, and snap isn't even tied to using snaps from their store. One could easily make a client app that treats
snapdmuch the wayapttreatsdpkg. (In fact givenapt-rpmI think it would probably be feasible to quite literally use apt for that.)KDE also maintains most of the flathub.org packages for KDE apps. Not sure what the point is here.
This is wrong in two ways. First, Canonical are the primary employers of a lot of Debian developers, including to do Debian maintenance or development. This includes at least one of the primary developers of apt. Canonical also upstreams a lot of their work to Debian. Second, of the three (!) whole packages that Canonical decided to make transitional packages to the snap, none were coming from upstream Debian. Firefox was being packaged by Mozilla (and Mozilla were the ones who decided to move it to the snap), Thunderbird's package had been something Canonical was packaging themselves due to the Debian/Mozilla trademark dispute that they never moved back to syncing from Debian due to technical issues with the port, and Chromium was, at least at the time, remaining frozen at old versions in a way that was unacceptable to Ubuntu users.
Good info. thanks.
sure, and convince people to switch. it's been done before of course but it's a big effort. And anyway, the main point with the closed-server issue is that it's impossible to know what the server does other than serving packages. this is true for other package repositories to a certain extent since there's no real guarantee that they run the source code they show, but there's a distributed trust network there. as for the snap store, they could be doing anything in there.
what i was trying to get at is that they're not hosting their own thing. they do host their own flatpak repo but it seems to be only for nightlies so that point wasn't as strong as i originally thought.
that does not mean that the particular developer agrees with or even approves of the snap thing. it's good to know though. i know they upstream, but that's sort of the bare minimum expected of them.
i've not really used ubuntu desktop lately, but i've been hearing more complaints from friends about it deciding to install snaps instead of debs lately. steam was a big one that a friend had trouble with, and they just installed that though apt i'm pretty sure.
I agree! But this, IMO, is a better argument for how flathub.org being (theoretically) open source doesn't actually make it any better than snapcraft.io. The technical hurdle, either of writing another snap store or of setting up a flatpak host, pales in comparison to the social hurdle of getting people to switch. Which is likely why the previous open snap store implementation died. Nobody wanted to host their own and convince people to switch, because at the end of the day there wasn't any benefit.
Never said it did, although in the particular case of the developer I mentioned, he's also an Ubuntu Core developer, which depends entirely on snaps. I can't imagine he'd have put himself in that position if he were particularly anti-snap
Ubuntu has never had a
steampackage in their apt repos, and thesteam-installerpackage still behaves the same way as ever. Personally, I do use the Steam snap and haven't had any issues with it, though I do know that others have.