I remember back in 2018 when they forced snaps on everyone despite them being broken.

I had recently updated to the new 18 or 19 release and I was installing a command line tool. I did apt install and then it called snap which then didn’t work. Snaps are broken by design as they way the handle software is problematic. They put everything into mounted volumes and the sandboxing isn’t terribly robust. It really doesn’t help that they force you to use it.

I use apt because I care about security

they both suck.

I think most people hate Snaps because Ubuntu is replacing .deb packages with snaps with no user prompt and that is a cardinal sin in Linux against the freedom and power of the user. Being “bloated” can’t help either when package maintainers do all what they can to ship programs light and simple. So it goes against at least two Linux principles.

I especially hate how it ruins the df -h command. Install a dozen snaps and it becomes unreadable

For me it is partially the way canonical pushes snaps and forces it on to users. More so they are slow and the proprietary back end is a huge downside. Some snaps are know broken and cause more harm then good like the steam snap for example. Steam actively discourages users from even using it.

Snap hate is largely illogical and brain dead in my view and experience. I see them at same level as systemd haters. We know how that turned out.

Snap is the only packaging system that provides sandboxing for system applications. But nobody will tell you this.

I no longer use Ubuntu since I matured enough for Debian, but I can use Ubuntu over other immature or weird distros any day.

Its been a while but the last time I was running ubuntu I ran into an infuriating issue related to snaps. To be fair I can’t remember the exact details and it was related to some web dev stuff. All I remember is that I quit Ubuntu for a while fighting with snaps for a day or two.

The server is proprietary and last I checked you can’t even turn off auto-updating or verify the binaries they push to you.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-mint-dumps-ubuntu-snap/

In the Ubuntu 20.04 package base, the Chromium package is indeed empty and acting, without your consent, as a backdoor by connecting your computer to the Ubuntu Store. Applications in this store cannot be patched, or pinned. You can’t audit them, hold them, modify them, or even point Snap to a different store. You’ve as much empowerment with this as if you were using proprietary software, i.e. none. This is in effect similar to a commercial proprietary solution, but with two major differences: It runs as root, and it installs itself without asking you.

I like snap. On Ubuntu, it does everything Flatpak does and it can also do system components. It’s a system that allows to build a complete OS with the benefits of Flatpak. It’s a fairly well designed system and it came earlier than Flatpak. It works well for Ubuntu and its developers. There’s a lot of misinformation around it and the wider community seems to have jumped on the Flatpak wagon. That means we’re unfortunately gonna get mixed classic-base (deb, rpm) with Flatpak apps OSes in the longer term, instead of full Snap OSes. That’s a lame compromise but it is what it is. Not the first time the Linux community chooses technically interior tech for ideological reasons. Ultimately we use other people’s labor so we get what they decide and that’s alright. Classic core plus Flatpak is still way better than the all-classic status quo so I ain’t mad.

As you can probably tell by all the lovely comments about Snaps, that’s the reason. Snaps is crap, by design.

The problem with snap isn’t that it’s useless, it’s that it’s garbage. Snaps are just plain worse in every way, compared to other packaging formats. They impact boot time A LOT… like A LOT A LOT on a hard drive, use a ton of space, are slow to launch unless you use like tricks or what not to speed up consequent launches after the 1st one, the store backend is proprietary and poorly moderated, the store is slow and unresponsive, and cannonnical is pulling some real micro$oft-esk shit to try and force them on users… Stuff like aliasing apt commands to snap, disallowing ubuntu spins to ship flatpak by default, etc…

The only redeeming quality that snaps have is that you can run CLI/server programs as a snap, and even then, just use docker lmao.

Lost a couple hours of work on the snap version of krita since it couldn’t save the file for some reason. Switched away from Ubuntu as a whole after that experience.

Imma be honest. I never used Snap. I had left ubuntu long before they started rolling it out.

That said, hearing they redirect apt calls to snap instead feels – A bit too microsofty for my tastes

Like, when you use a flatpak (or even a snap!) in a non-ubuntu distro, you’re not forced to use it. And if the same package exists on both the repo and on flatpak/snap, you CAN choose to get it from any of the three sources. Forcing people into snap is weird and scummy.

I have heard that snap is slower than flatpak, but also that it can do some stuff flatpak cannot, but again, didn’t test enough to know it.

snapdeez nuts