Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote DEBs (Apparently)

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Ubuntu 23.10's New Software App Will Demote DEBs (Apparently) - OMG! Ubuntu
omgubuntu.co.uk

A new ‘app store’ is expected to ship as part of Ubuntu 23.10 when it’s released in October — and it’ll debut with a notable change to DEB support.

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Classic canonical move: Take community software, force snaps into it and then ship it.

Yep, I can not understand why Canonical keep pushing snaps on desktop

Because maintaining snaps is a lot less work for whoever maintains the package, upstream developers, volunteers, or Canonical. If I'm shipping software for Ubuntu and I can use snap, I sure as hell will use it instead of deb.

Flatpaks are so much better than snaps. There's nothing that Snaps can do that Flatpaks can't do better, aside from CLI tools. But CLI tools should just be in Docker anyways.

Flatpak is mainly for packaging desktop apps, whilst snap can update the entire distro (kernel, mesa, system apps, cli). Snap does things Fedora needs rpm-ostree for.

In my opinion docker isn't as useful for cli tools. I need easy access to many little tools, and this results in me having one container with everything. But that doesn't work well with network capture etc. In the end being able to install packages system wide quickly is really useful.

Exactly. Docker is very much not an appropriate tool for "CLI apps."

I use it for pandadoc CLI all the time, it's great.

You could do it of course but it's far from ideal for the purpose of a general case CLI. Unless your script yourself a wrapper, the invocation is fairly verbose. It also leaves containers behind unless you specifically pass --rm which isn't default. Then there's the intricacies of the different ways of passing data to it. Oh and let's not forget that unless you setup rootless Docker, or you do something dangerous like adding yourself to the docker group, you have to always invoke with sudo. Therefore I wouldn't say that Docker is an appropriate tool for CLI apps in general. For dependency-bundled CLI apps, Snap doesn't have these gotchas and is therefore much closer to ideal CLI UX.

because they won't need to maintain it, they won't even need to maintain the dependencies, some guy online will maintain the package and it's dependency for them, whether it's updated or not, it's going to launch, that's the whole point of those style of packaging

Because they something to lock you in to Ubuntu. They want Ubuntu to be the only thing that uses snaps. They want to get snaps to be an Ubuntu exclusive feature, and once they can start convincing some random closed source devs to ship in only the snap format they have a hook to keep you on Ubuntu. And they want those random random closed source devs to be focused on more of the corporate world so they can sell some support licenses.

Snap is easily available on other distros as well. If anything, they want to lock you into their proprietary store.

do they get funding from hardware vendors? snaps use a lot more resources

'Classic canonical corporate move'...there I fixed it for you.