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

Ignacio@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 225 points – 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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The fundamental difference is that flatpak is a good system, adopted by many distributions.

Snap sucks and only Ubuntu uses it.

They'll do like their Unity UI, wait many years until they realize their mistake then drop it.

I hate that they also SEO'd the hell out of major search engines to show snap setup and installation instructions when anyone searches for installing a package. E.g. "arch install firefox" leads to https://snapcraft.io/install/firefox/arch which is downright dishonest marketing.

On google it's the 4th result for me even in private mode which seems pretty reasonable. The first result is the firefox archwiki page.

I beg to differ. I think it's very harmful.

  • There as absolutely no reason for anyone in Arch to use snap to install something mainstream like Firefox. Same goes for other OS's like Fedora etc. (which are all mined in similar way, just change it to /fedora for instance).
  • The page presents itself as if it's the only choice, and can easily scam someone who's just getting into Linux into installing snap. I think it's designed for that purpose. Arch links to the package, but not step by step guide (which is on Arch), but this can easily lure people into installing snap and being none the wiser the it's not the default package manager for their distro.
  • It's 4th for Firefox, but I've seen it as the top result for some other packages. Probably Google caught up, or probably for packages not mainstream as Firefox it still shows snap as number one result.

IIRC Flatpack is also FOSS whereas the Snap server software is proprietary

Snap is foss on the client end etc iirc. but the server that serves up content is proprietary.