anti-snap stance is anti-consumer

Linux@lemmy.ml – 12 points – 4 months ago

The title is a quote from Mastodon. I’ve always seen dislike towards snap so I was taken back when I saw this stance. The person who wrote this was referring to Tuxedo Laptops.

What are your thoughts on this?

EDIT:

Here’s the original comment: https://mastodon.social/@popey/112591863166141029

EDIT 2:

Some clarification for those accusing me of not following the thread or being disingenuous.

Didn't bother to follow the thread?

https://mastodon.social/@popey/112593520847827981

I posted my question here before this particular response from the OP. I asked the question on Lemmy out of interest and wanting to get a wider perspective. I also engaged with the OP on the thread so that I can get their perspective on their stance.

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The Venn diagram of supported apps isn't also a perfect circle. You can't run VPNs as Flatpaks, and Flathub disallows CLI apps from being submitted (because the UX of using a sandboxed CLI app sucks). Snap doesn't have these issues.

because the UX of using a sandboxed CLI app sucks

I think it is more because of this issue because as far as I know snaps have some level of sandbox and you can still use CLI apps as you said.

Very interesting read, thanks for the link. This seems like a major shortcoming of flatpak!

This is another issue with:

https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/46

https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak.github.io/issues/191

https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/1651

Others like valve have just ignored the issue for years, but the flatpak devs decided to argue that it doesn't apply to them, to the point that one even mentioned modifying the spec so that they are exempt...

Yeah that's solidly it. I use strictly confined CLI snaps all the time. (In fact, I maintain the snaps for a couple of CLI apps.) They work fine as long as the snap has the right plugs.

But I don't want to have to run flatpak run dev.htop.htop to get to htop.

No there are many CLI apps on Flathub.

Helix, and others.

Helix opens it's own GUI when you run it. It's not a CLI app in the same sense as git. I'm curious on the others you mention, since as a packager, I've seen firsthand CLI apps being declined (or allowed, but only with a hidden status on flathub.org)

Interesting. Yes I had some other editor too, it opened a new terminal tab.

There is some flatpak export bin directory where the binaries are, I think you can put that to your PATH and have a pretty good CLI experience.