The issues are twofold: Linux distros historically update software through a package manager. Something that was working fine for everyone, however it was causing a lot of work for maintainers. They got together and designed a packaging format for software that works across all Linux distributions called ‘flatpak’. However, Ubuntu decided to create an alternative called Snap, which solves the same problem, except it’s not used by anyone else.
Also, there’s some implementation details that make it look messy in your system (every application is mounted as it’s own filesystem, so if you use tools to list your disk’s there’s a bunch of weird spammy looking drives and things like that).
Awesome! Thank you for this explanation. So it’s mostly just because it’s a redundancy and specific to a certain distro (Ubuntu in this case)?
Specific to Ubuntu, not very open for collaboration, and operated by the company who owns the Ubuntu trademarks. Additionally they’ve made it unnecessarily difficult to install non-snap versions of many popular packages. (they removed non-snap versions from upstream Debian repositories).
Native package managers were not “working fine for everyone”, the software and libraries in them are often very outdated and contain custom patches that don’t come from the original software authors.
So you often end up dealing with bugs that were already fixed and the fixes released months ago.
That’s one of the main reasons I use a rolling release distro. I used Arch for years, and now I use Tumbleweed.
With packaged apps (like flatpak, snap, etc), you can end up with outdated dependencies in those apps because they bundle everything together. So instead of fixing bugs once for everyone, you have to pester each individual package maintainer to update the dependencies. However, this is mitigated by having these apps be somewhat containerized and limiting impact of a breach on other apps, so YMMV depending on what kind of sandboxing you use.
I’m not really decided here, and I use both flatpaks and distro packages. I don’t touch snaps though.
Didn’t it also used to be noticeably slower than apt installed apps? This was one of the reasons I got rid of it at the time, Ive heard it has better performance now but not tried it.
