Comment by simosx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simosx | Hacker News Reader

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Snap is not "centralized". It comes with a default Store, and this helps most users that require modern package management.

If you want to distribute manually your .snap packages, then you can certainly do so.

For example, the libreoffice snap is easily available for download at https://uappexplorer.com/snap/ubuntu/libreoffice The recipe to create the snap package is shown on the same page. You can recreate the snap package and then keep it for yourself. Or, upload it to your website and share with your friends.

After you download the .snap package, just click on it and it will prompt you to install it.

What you do not get with snaps, is the source code of the Ubuntu Store. Most likely, if someone is really interested to replicate the store, I believe it is easy to reverse-engineer, then create a reference implementation.

That's somewhat disingenuous comparison.

Snap, as an ecosystem, includes not only the .snap package, but also the remote side, equivalent to apt/yum. Even if you do not want the store equivalent, just plain old repo, you cannot do that with snap. You would have to replicate all the add repo/check for updates/install/update logic on the client side too - snap won't allow you to register your repo, even if you had your server side solved (side note: for apt, yum, flatpak, plain old httpd server is enough).

Therefore, when comparing with flatpak, which does allow remote-add/delete/info/ls/update, snap is centralized. The "you can code it yourself" is not an argument; you can code yourself equivalent to many other proprietary systems, and that does not make them open or less limited.

According to the FAQ, the snap you get from uappexplorer.com is actually from Canonical's central app store.

https://uappexplorer.com/faq

uApp Explorer is not affiliated with Canonical and does not host any apps. uApp Explorer only displays publicly available information about the official Ubuntu Touch appstore.

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