Good info. thanks.
One could easily make a client app
sure, and convince people to switch. it’s been done before of course but it’s a big effort. And anyway, the main point with the closed-server issue is that it’s impossible to know what the server does other than serving packages. this is true for other package repositories to a certain extent since there’s no real guarantee that they run the source code they show, but there’s a distributed trust network there. as for the snap store, they could be doing anything in there.
KDE also maintains most of the flathub.org packages for KDE apps.
what i was trying to get at is that they’re not hosting their own thing. they do host their own flatpak repo but it seems to be only for nightlies so that point wasn’t as strong as i originally thought.
Canonical are the primary employers of a lot of Debian developers, including to do Debian maintenance or development. This includes at least one of the primary developers of apt.
that does not mean that the particular developer agrees with or even approves of the snap thing. it’s good to know though. i know they upstream, but that’s sort of the bare minimum expected of them.
i’ve not really used ubuntu desktop lately, but i’ve been hearing more complaints from friends about it deciding to install snaps instead of debs lately. steam was a big one that a friend had trouble with, and they just installed that though apt i’m pretty sure.
sure, and convince people to switch. it’s been done before of course but it’s a big effort
I agree! But this, IMO, is a better argument for how flathub.org being (theoretically) open source doesn’t actually make it any better than snapcraft.io. The technical hurdle, either of writing another snap store or of setting up a flatpak host, pales in comparison to the social hurdle of getting people to switch. Which is likely why the previous open snap store implementation died. Nobody wanted to host their own and convince people to switch, because at the end of the day there wasn’t any benefit.
that does not mean that the particular developer agrees with or even approves of the snap thing.
Never said it did, although in the particular case of the developer I mentioned, he’s also an Ubuntu Core developer, which depends entirely on snaps. I can’t imagine he’d have put himself in that position if he were particularly anti-snap
steam was a big one that a friend had trouble with, and they just installed that though apt i’m pretty sure.
Ubuntu has never had a steam package in their apt repos, and the steam-installer package still behaves the same way as ever. Personally, I do use the Steam snap and haven’t had any issues with it, though I do know that others have.
