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Comment by pixelmonkey | Hacker News Reader

I think they just realized it gives them a way to package proprietary apps like Skype, Spotify, and Slack a bit more simply than would be required to apt-ify/dpkg-ify them. I really think that's the primary motivation.

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If it's to avoid this kind of aberrations https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22864985 it's totally understandable, but in practice, it doesn't work that smoothly unfortunately, not to mention the potential vendor lockdown, or as the Mint team phrased it:

> If you’re a Fedora user and you want to install Spotify, you’re told to go to https://snapcraft.io/spotify. Spotify doesn’t distribute RPM packages, appimage, Flatpak or anything useful to a Fedora user who wants to download it, or to a Fedora maintainer who wants to add it to a repository. Fedora users are told to go to what is essentially a commercial store operated by a RedHat competitor where stats tell them their distribution is only 7th best.

> We’re in luck, we can still download the .deb. If Spotify stops caring, what do we do? We move to snap because we have to? Will the snap store continue to let people download actual .snap files in the future or will that get locked down ? Will the snap store continue to operate without an Ubuntu One account or will we get vendor-locked ?

https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3766

And it's a pretty good one since the experience with having a large catalog of useful software in Flatpaks has been awesome and largely seamless. I just wish Canonical wasn't off doing their own thing or had started out in the open from the start so it would have a chance of being a useful standard instead of the weird Canonical store.

The number one reason why I don't like snap is: it puts Canonical in control.

Only Canonical can run a store. Once you install something, Canonical decides, when packages on your computers will upgrade. Wrt control, it goes way beyond Apple store/Google Play/Microsoft Store.

No thanks. Flatpak can preserve the benefits of decentralized repositories and upgrade under user control, with all the ease of packaging and sandboxing of the new toys.

I can never figure out Canonical's logic with going off to do their own thing. They don't do it with everything, so clearly it's not a complete rejection of things not made in-house.

It seems like they also often end up going back to the community solutions/standards eventually, so what benefit do they see in doing this over and over again?

Does it force the community solution to improve? If the options are community or Canonical does that competition have benefits to both? Not sure Canonical are thinking that explicitly but maybe it’s just hedging their bets if the community solution doesn’t work out.

But this is a false dichotomy, because Flatpak is a project controlled by Red Hat. Unless by "community" project you mean AppImages.

FlatPak is a project initially hosted on freedesktop.org infrastructure with distributed copyright ownership under a copyleft license. It was initially founded by Red Hat employees but has attracted substantial support and contributions by companies such as Endless and Collabora, not to mention volunteer contributors.

The sandboxing part was spun off to the bubblewrap project, which has been adopted by the community for other purposes, such as Gnome's Epiphany browser.

https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap

https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2020/03/11/epiphany-3-36-...

SnapCraft on the other hand is a project that requires copyright assignment to Canonical Ltd for contributions, which presumably has the intended effects of keeping non-Canonical contributions close to zero.

https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.m...

I'm speaking in general, this would also include the Gnome churn a few years ago. Canonical seems to build their own thing then abandon it in favor of what the community was doing before or during the development of the Canonical thing. I'm just spitballing why that may happen.

Considering that Flatpak was essentially a hostile fork of the AppImage project motivated by Red Hat's insatiable hunger for control, I find it ironic when Flatpak supporters complain about Canonical "doing their own thing".

FlatPak has nothing to do with AppImage, is in no way shape or from a fork of it.

https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2018/06/20/flatpak-a-history/

AppImage only solves the easy part of the generic-linux-app problem, namely running the packaged appimage; it does nothing to solve the hard parts: how do you build the application so that it will actually run on generic Linux distributions, and sandboxing.

Got a source for any of those claims?

I don't know about Spotify, but both Skype and Slack are distributed with private apt repositories and it works just fine.

Spotify is too. Their deb repo is just outdated compared to their snap (which itself is outdated compared to what's available on macOS and Windows). I think it's fair to say they don't care much.

I like the way arch does it. They have AUR and everything is there and they can just say they don’t support it.

Happy Arch and AUR user chiming in, a custody, or emigrant, from the F snap hell Ubuntu caused, and it's easy to verify and vet AUR content, if you care enough, the scripts are legible, readable, so it's just a matter of caring about your system. I agree, I am so happy about the Arch system since Ubuntu bit, ate wholehartedly, the snap bullshit. Thank fuck for AUR.

Thank fuck for the Arch Wiki, too - even if you’re not on Arch.

Upboated and agreed. ++

I think ubuntu also has similar stuff via PPA repository?

PPA is hell. Arch is love and life.

The AUR is so transparent. If I want to see how the AUR package is getting built, ez, read the PKGBUILD linked right from the packages page. I was immediately turned off to using Snap because I couldn't find how the Snap was built and really who built it. No Thanks, that's not how I install software on my personal computer anymore, it's one of the main reasons I exited windows as soon as I started to learn about infosec and trust.

Not only that but modifying the pkgbuild for yourself is trivial. Very convenient for installing patched kernels.

Yep I upvoted the whole tree. Agree(d). ++

Life, indeed. Reading the (excellent, mind you) documentation and, especially, the wiki is fun, I know, but sometimes I want to focus on something else (like getting things done).

Totally agree, just have to report back that it's no huge'er job in terms of systems management. But am on your page. I guess it's relative, I was Ubuntu, too, because I liked the next-next-next ideology, but, when it comes to it, either system-types can be as maintenance free as any other. Rolling releases has the convenience of not being so difficult to upgrade, as you just roll along, you sometimes end up having to reinstall, on these systems like here, like Ubuntu and co I mean. But yeah work is what's most important. I've been a happy Ubuntu user for ages, glad you're getting your work done. It's all that matters relatively speaking. Thanks

In all your examples, it is their respective company that does the packaging. Skype is packaged by Microsoft, and so on. Here is the Skype snap page, https://snapcraft.io/skype

Canonical provides the tools and several companies are providing their software as snap packages.

Another example is JetBrains that provide all their development environments as snap packages.

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