Ubuntu Snap Hate

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.

• proprietary server (snap store), unlike flatpak
• snapd only allows one server (but it is foss so you could just patch it), unlike flatpak
• nonexistent security on snap store, multiple times malware, unlike flatpak
• no sandboxing without apparmor and specific profiles, so not cross platform, unlike flatpak
• the system apps are also requiring apparmor, so not cross platform
• they lack granular permission systems afaik
• they concur with flatpak, which is horrible as we need a universal packaging format, not 3
• seemingly no reproducible builds?
• no separation between all, opensource, verified repo, unlike flatpak
• they pollute the mount list with all the loop devices

And people complain abour resource usage etc, but that is just separating apps from the system. Flatpak does the same.

Research what happened to Upstart, Mir or Unity. It won't take long until snap becomes one of them. Somebody at canonical seems to desperately obsess over having something unique, either as a way to justify canonicals existance or even in the hopes of making the next big thing. Over all these years they never learned that whatever they do exclusively will always fall short of any other joint efforts in the linux world, because they always lack the technical advances, ability/will to push it for a prolonged time and/or the non-proprietary-ness. So instead of collaborating like every serious linux vendor, they're polluting their distro with half-assed, ever changing and unwanted experiments. They're even hijacking apt commands to push their stupid snap stuff against the users intent. With the shengians they're pulling Ubuntu cannot be relied on, and with that they're sabotaging their own success and drive away any commercial customers that generate revenue.

Well, things like the fact that snap is supposed to be a distro-agnostic packaging method despite being only truly supported on Ubuntu is annoying. The fact that its locked to the Canonical store is annoying. The fact that it requires a system daemon to function is annoying.

My main gripes with it stem from my job though, since at the university where I work snap has been an absolute travesty;
It overflows the mount table on multi-user systems.
It slows down startup a ridiculous amount even if barely any snaps are installed.
It can't run user applications if your home drive is mounted over NFS with safe mount options.
It has no way to disable automatic updates during change critical times - like exams.

There's plenty more issues we've had with it, but those are the main ones that keep causing us issues.
Notably Flatpak doesn't have any of the listed issues, and it also supports both shared installations as well as internal repos, where we can put licensed or bulky software for courses - something which snap can't support due to the centralized store design.

I hate snap, because their store is proprietary and i think forcing something with a proprietary store on you is microsoft level shit which is why i left in the first place.

Also i dont like being "forced", theyre doing that a little with the apt install sometimes going to snap install

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.

Personally I think for home users or niche there should be a snap less variant of this distribution with all the bells and whistles.

There is : Linux Mint

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.

In addition to what's already been said, Canonical have a history of starting grandiose projects and then abandoning them a few years later. See Mir, Unity, and Ubuntu Touch for examples.

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 would hate snaps a lot less if Ubuntu just stopped trying to force me to use them.

Calling it hate is an exaggeration , people are entitled to their opinion and informing other people by criticizing snap.

Another advantage not mentioned is that snap is a product of canonical (a for profit company talking about an IPO for years), flathub is managed by the gnome foundation (a US registered non profit, which should provide some legal protection).

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

Snaps are proprietary, flatpacks are not, is the long and short of it

When I install this snap am I getting a kernel driver, a native raw binary, or a containerized user application that conforms to a communication interface? Who knows! They're all mostly undifferentiated in the store.

What about a third party store? Only if you fork the snap daemon and change the hard coded URL. And good luck with that mandatory Canonical contributer agreement you have to sign.

Want to pick when your apps update? Nope. That's the official stance. They will never support that. But here's a way to manually block network access to the daemon if you really really need to. But then everything will update at once when you give it access again.

Want a specific version of a snap? See above. Explicitly will never be an option.

"I guess there's a fee to pay to get access to quality apps." Incorrect. There is no real vetting process for what's added to the store, there's barely even minimal checking that you're not overwriting someone else's snap. You do have to sign the Canonical contributor agreement, and setup an identity to submit as, but even if your snap is proven to be malware there a good chance it will stay in the store, or can be immediately re-uploaded.

I'm personally not a fan of any universal packaging solution. I've tried flatpaks, appimages, and snaps, and ran into weird, annoying issued that I just never have when I install via package manager, build from source or even just run a portable build of an app.

I see the appeal of a universal package, but imo a bigger emphasis on portable native builds would solve a lot of the issues these packaging solutions are aiming for, while not introducing many of the downsides

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.

snapdeez nuts

they both suck.

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.

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.

I use apt because I care about security

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 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.

So like... I understand the why behind flatpaks and snaps, but I'm an end-user, and more often than not they just make things more difficult, in my opinion.

They're really great for server setups for sort of keeping each individual application from being able to deeply influence other applications or the root filesystem.

But this means if I installed the Spotify snap (at least when I last tried a few years ago) I had to jump through a bunch of hoops to get it to be able to access my media files where all my music was stored.

So like I said, great for out-of-the-box-server setups where the everything is a little separated from each other (kind of like Docker, from what I understand, but at the app-level? I could be wrong here.) because it helps default security settings and interactions from getting confusing quickly.

However, for your casual end-user, it can quickly become a confusing nightmare if you actually do need your applications more easily interacting with one another because you're just trying to write an email.

Anyway, that's my personal opinion: The reasons they exist server-side are pretty solid, but the reasons they exist on desktops for the end-user are less compelling and often result in user frustration.

I read a comment on Reddit a while back that pointed out how much of the open source community has no issue hosting projects on GitHub while also lampooning Snap for having a closed-source backend server. However, since Snap (and GitHub) are open source themselves, nothing is stopping curious and concerned users from auditing the codebase or hosting their own servers. I removed Snap from my Ubuntu installation and use Flatpak instead, but I do not hate Snap. And for what it's worth, I always go for the native DEB when possible...