Unpopular opinion: snap is not so bad and genuinely useful for many things
I would rather have a snap than building from source or use some tar.gz archive with a sketchy install script
some tar.gz archive with a sketchy install script
I just can’t… like maybe I’m too old and that’s why I still can’t wrap my head around how we went from “./configure && make & make install scripts are almost the de facto way to install software in linux” to “a sketchy install script”. We’re living interesting times at Linux
Last time I ran a corporate-made installer, it caused massive graphical glitches and lock-ups after waking from sleep. It basically gave my system computer-AIDS.
That’s why I never run scripts which are too long for me to easily understand outside a sandbox. Official distro repositories and Flatpaks are the only sources I have some level of trust in.
I remember those times too. The difference today is that there are so many more libraries and projects use those libraries a lot more often.
So using configure and make means that the user also has the responsibility of ensuring all those libraries are up to date. Which again if we’re talking about not using binary install, each also need a regular configure/make process too. It’s not that unusual for large packages to have dependencies on 100+ libraries. At which point building and maintaining the build for all of them yourself becomes untenable really. However I think gentoo exists to automate a lot of this while still building from source.
I understand why binaries with references to other binary packages for prerequisites are used. I also understand where the limits of this are and why the AppImage/Flatpak/snaps exist. I just don’t particularly like the latter as a concept. But accept there’s times you might need them.
I would rather have a snap than building from source or use some tar.gz archive with a sketchy install script
I agree, but that sounds like false dichotomy to me because snap competes with flatpak.
I never presented this as a dichotomy. You know, people prefer things in a certain order, right? I prefer Flatpaks and native packages over snaps and I prefer snaps to building from source.
There are plenty of use cases that snap provides that flatpak doesn’t - they only compete in a subset of snap’s functionality. For example, flatpak does not (and is not designed to) provide a way to use it to distribute kernels or system services.
I don’t think that the distribution of system packages is the issue. People need a way to easily distribute and obtain everyday applications, and to keep them up to date in the same manner. Linus spoke about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc
I would prefer manually writing each software using butterflies over having snapd installed on my system.
Better cli experience and the permission prompts are two that come to mind.
I’d rather be able to use my web browser uninterrupted without it being updated while using it and be forced to restart it.
The updates download in the background and will install when you exit the snapped app. If you really don’t want automatic updates, you can run snap refresh --hold to hold all automatic updates or add a snap name to hold updates for that snap.
Nope. There have been multiple times where I have my browser open, in the middle of something and when I go to open a new tab/window I get a blank screen telling me I need to restart FF to continue.
