Holy fuck. I hope KDE snaps aren’t going to be mandatory. I just reinstalled Kubuntu to erase Windows from my PC and I’ve had quite a hard time working around snaps.
I regret not installing Debian as I said I would but changed my mind last minute thinking it wouldn’t be so bad…
You can as of yet still disable Snaps entirely on *buntu and enable Flatpak instead. I doubt you’ll be getting them as regular .deb packages for long still though…
Sure. But when packages become exclusively available as Snaps, that’s just asking for users to dump the distro for something else.
Why would we need to turn KDE packages into Snaps??? That’ll slow down the whole startup process because Snaps are stored compressed and will need to be decompressed before launch. And why have your whole DE in a sandbox??? That doesn’t make any sense to me. Unless they’re talking about only the applications. But even then that’s too much.
The Ubuntu Core Desktop demo at SCALE this year actually got me pretty excited for my desktop in a snap, or at least for playing with that. The closest analogy I have is to NixOS, since it’s way more flexible than just an immutable base.
If I can get some sort of KDE Neon type distro with immutable apps and desktop, I could potentially switch my family over to that and manage it all remotely (really big deal since my family is spread across 3 continents). Landscape is pretty good at remotely managing Ubuntu Core (I’ve not found anything even close for NixOS), so I’m hopeful this would reduce my management work when my family’s current Chromebooks need replacing.
But KDE never will be exculsively available as snaps. Again, you can just install Flatpak and get them from there. Or get Debian and stick to .deb, it’s largely the same base as Ubuntu anyway.
KDE is pretty tech neutral. They publish on Flathub too.
Personally I’m pretty excited about the snaps of more KDE apps, as it’ll allow me to have the latest KDE apps even on my systems where Flatpak just shits the bed.
