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.
I don’t have anything against Snap itself. It’s the exclusivity to snaps and nothing else that bothers me. Like, you don’t have a choice but to use snap for some packages.
While it may be a good solution for your scenario, but it’s not for mine. I should be able to decide if I want a software as a snap or not. And if someone wants to use snaps exclusively, there should be some configuration to set to do this. It shouldn’t be imposed on the end users.
It’s the exclusivity to snaps and nothing else that bothers me. Like, you don’t have a choice but to use snap for some packages.
Seems like a weird take. Before snap came along this was true to the same extent of Ubuntu with Debs. The fact that they’re migrating some of the packages they maintain (that also happen to be the trickier ones to maintain as deb files) to snaps doesn’t prevent you from getting another repo that has the package as a deb and using that any more than your distro not having the latest version of an app prevents you from downloading and building a tarball.
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 won’t provide them exclusively as Snaps. But *Ubuntu might. It seems to be the aim with Kubuntu from what I understand. (Correct me if I’m mistaken.)
Canonical might only care about Snaps, but like I keep saying you can just enable Flatpak and get it from there. Only if you want debs you’ll have to move away.
The point is that sometimes the sandboxing can break certain features in certain software. And if the software is only available as a snap or even flatpak, but not the original deb or rpm, then you’re stuck with a broken software.
This was the case, for example, for my browsers and some of their extensions that need to communicate with external tools like media downloaders or even password vault access, like keepass.
@PureTryOut@cyborganism just found out, that it was a good decision to move to debian.
Already hated it that I regularily lost my firefox profile because of this snap stuff…
Absolutely. I can get around some Snaps right now with Kubuntu 24.04 but I don’t know how long I’ll be able to with the next versions.
I regret not installing Debian, which was my 2nd choice. I’ve just been a loyal *Ubuntu user for 20 years so I thought I’d give it one last chance and because I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with it.
Next time I’ll install Debian testing as a rolling distro. I think it’s stable enough and even more stable than most Arch flavors or even OpenSuse Tumbleweed. With a solid snapshot strategy it should be safe enough.
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.
That might be a good solution for you, yes.
I don’t have anything against Snap itself. It’s the exclusivity to snaps and nothing else that bothers me. Like, you don’t have a choice but to use snap for some packages.
While it may be a good solution for your scenario, but it’s not for mine. I should be able to decide if I want a software as a snap or not. And if someone wants to use snaps exclusively, there should be some configuration to set to do this. It shouldn’t be imposed on the end users.
Seems like a weird take. Before snap came along this was true to the same extent of Ubuntu with Debs. The fact that they’re migrating some of the packages they maintain (that also happen to be the trickier ones to maintain as deb files) to snaps doesn’t prevent you from getting another repo that has the package as a deb and using that any more than your distro not having the latest version of an app prevents you from downloading and building a tarball.
That’s if the maintainer of that software provides the repo. Like Firefox. But that’s not always the case.
And I don’t see why I should be the one that has to take the extra steps to add these to my sources when having the choice should be the default OOTB.
I simply don’t understand how this is any different from the fact that Ubuntu doesn’t include RPMs?
That’s totally different.
Do you even know what’s the difference between a .deb/.rpm and a snap?
I’m quite aware. I’m currently a maintainer of packages in all three formats.
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 won’t provide them exclusively as Snaps. But *Ubuntu might. It seems to be the aim with Kubuntu from what I understand. (Correct me if I’m mistaken.)
Canonical might only care about Snaps, but like I keep saying you can just enable Flatpak and get it from there. Only if you want debs you’ll have to move away.
That’s not the point.
The point is that sometimes the sandboxing can break certain features in certain software. And if the software is only available as a snap or even flatpak, but not the original deb or rpm, then you’re stuck with a broken software.
This was the case, for example, for my browsers and some of their extensions that need to communicate with external tools like media downloaders or even password vault access, like keepass.
@PureTryOut @cyborganism just found out, that it was a good decision to move to debian.
Already hated it that I regularily lost my firefox profile because of this snap stuff…
Absolutely. I can get around some Snaps right now with Kubuntu 24.04 but I don’t know how long I’ll be able to with the next versions.
I regret not installing Debian, which was my 2nd choice. I’ve just been a loyal *Ubuntu user for 20 years so I thought I’d give it one last chance and because I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with it.
Next time I’ll install Debian testing as a rolling distro. I think it’s stable enough and even more stable than most Arch flavors or even OpenSuse Tumbleweed. With a solid snapshot strategy it should be safe enough.
@cyborganism Same. Also sticked long to Kubuntu.
However, they lost me.
Tried Debian testing. But wasnt really stable. Lost some packages during update. So switched to stable and I’m fine with it.
There’s not that much software I need in latest version.