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> On Ubuntu you can go to the Ubuntu software app (gui) search for software and it blends apt results with snap results.

GNOME Software and KDE Discover support both Flatpak and the distribution's native package manager together. For example implementations on Ubuntu-based distributions that work out of the box, see the elementaryOS AppCenter and the Pop!_OS Pop!_Shop:

https://github.com/elementary/appcenter

https://github.com/pop-os/shop

Just wanted to +1 Pop's Pop!_Shop. I have machines running both Ubuntu and Pop!_OS, and for some reason (not sure if it's because of the underlying tech/architecture differences, System76 curation, or what), the Pop package management has always been a better experience than Ubuntu's.

I like that after significant upgrades via apt, Pop!_OS shows a short summary of the updated system. Little touches like that go a long way in improving the experience.

I want to like Pop!_Shop more, but it seems to start in the background on boot and hog 800MB of memory on my laptop while doing nothing. Not great on a RAM-constricted machine.

> If desktop Linux is ever going to be mainstream there needs to be an easy to use "app store" where users can use a GUI to install apps which need to be sandboxed like on a mobile phone with defined permissions.

Curious... do you think that the world has moved on from the "download from website and run installer" model? Obviously that has serious drawbacks from a security perspective, but up until less than a decade ago, that was the only way to get software on Windows and macOS, and they were perfectly mainstream.

I think the majority of users out there don't understand sandboxing or permissions models or why they are useful. While I think those are the users that probably benefit from them the most, it doesn't follow that we need these things before average users will embrace a particular platform.

> A lot of people are mad at Canonical for not open sourcing the backend but no one seems to be offering to build one.

You mention Flatpak and then two sentences later claim this?

I think maybe you're just missing the point. I have been using Linux as my daily driver for a good two decades now. I don't care one bit about Linux being a mainstream desktop distro. Sure, if it was, new (and even not-so-new) hardware would get better support, and that would be a win. But getting that is not a fair trade off if what we have to accept in return is a closed-source, walled-garden software delivery model. Hard pass, no thanks.

For the most part, the only people who really care about "the year of the Linux desktop" are people trying to build a business around desktop Linux. Those aren't the sorts of people I want making decisions like this, but, unfortunately, they're often the kinds of people who have the ability to force these things on the community.

No one is offering to build an alternate store for snaps, Flatpak is building an entirely different executable.

Why would anyone offer an alternate store for snaps?

Ubuntu seems to have made clear that the snap client will not be able to connect to alternative stores. What is the point of building an alternative store.

Further snap is controlled by one company. Canonical has a history of developing groundbreaking new things for the Linux community before unceremoniously killing them off.

* Ubuntu One * Unity Desktop * Ubuntu Touch * Upstart Init system

Do you see a trend here? There is a reason the community is skeptical of something completely controlled by Canonical.

Continuing Ubuntu One was not sustainable: https://ubuntu.com/blog/shutting-down-ubuntu-one-file-servic...

Ubuntu One file syncing, also server part, has been Open Sourced with much effort from Canonical: https://ubuntu.com/blog/ubuntu-one-file-syncing-code-open-so...

Ubuntu Touch https://ubports.com is run by community and has rapid progress, it's running on PinePhone etc.

Canonical would have liked to continue Unity: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/10/why-did-ubuntu-drop-unit...

I would presume Upstart Init system was changed to systemd because other distros started using systemd.

I don't see a trend here.

You have described a trend where those technologies failed to gain sustainable traction and Canonical stopped investing in them. Whether they did this because they are evil or unlucky is not the point.

I believe that the Canonical Snap server is hardcoded into snapd, so even if someone did implement their own you would need to recompile snapd to even use it.

Of course it is and of course you would need to recompile snapd. These are standard practices in software engineering.

Laying countertops is standard handyman stuff but if your coffeepot doesn't do anything truly unique and requires you to rip it up to switch coffeepots it may be ill designed.

>For the most part, the only people who really care about "the year of the Linux desktop" are people trying to build a business around desktop Linux

As another long time Linux guy, I have a feeling most of those obsessed with Linux becoming a mainstream desktop platform are Mac or Windows users.

Same. I'm running Linux as my primary desktop and server operating system for ~16 years, and I don't really care if it's becoming more mainstream on desktops anymore. It's already working perfectly fine for my needs, so I don't even want it to change much.

But it should at least continue to grow on the same rate as Windows and Mac. Losing market share is gonna be disastrous, as it would mean less software supported, and companies give less time to ensure quality of software supported.

There are a lot of web developers who aren't thrilled with Apple's current lineup.

They just want to get Chrome and VSCode running without any headaches.

> For the most part, the only people who really care about "the year of the Linux desktop" are people trying to build a business around desktop Linux.

I used to care, nowadays I just focus on Apple, Google and Microsoft platforms instead, and leave Linux for cloud VMs.

Flatpak is not a walled garden. Flathub totally messed up the decentralised aspect of flatpak but in theory flatpak can be totally decentralised and you would add software source like you add .debs PPA

Flatpak doesn't impose closed-source, we have distros which only use open source flatpak repos.

Models like Flatpak have the advantage of "download from website & install" i.e you get the apps directly from the producer (which is better for security) while having no walled garden app store but having the advantage of auto updates & permission systems

I do not like Flatpak for technical reasons but Flatpak itself is in no way a walled garden solution, the problem is Flathub.

> I don't care one bit about Linux being a mainstream desktop distro

If you still want to be able to run Linux at all (not even on new hardware) on a consumer hardware, then you should care.

- Linux doesn't run (decently) on Microsoft latest surfaces - Linux won't run on new Apple hardware - Linux doesn't run on Android phones (with a few exceptions) - once Google switch to Fushia no more Linux kernel on mobile hardware - on the long term Huawei will ditch Android and other OS for their own thing.

Linux will die on consumer hardware (except on servers) if it does not become more popular. According to Apple's keynote the future of Linux is in its cage, in a VM running on walled garden MacOS. According to Microsoft the future of Linux is WSL, running on top Windows.

If you do not like walled garden then you should definitively care about Linux getting more mainstream before no comsumer hardwares support it anymore

> If desktop Linux is ever going to be mainstream there needs to be an easy to use "app store"

Why? Desktop computers worked just fine for 35 or so years before app stores showed up. It's completely unnecessary.

Yes but I believe that most causal non techy users just wont put up with it or at least would much prefer a GUI.

With gadgets similar to iPhones and iPads I think we'd be better off designating general purpose computers for professional use, and not having to worry about hypothetical "grandpas" installing malware while checking the weather, especially on Linux.

Yeah I actually agree with you. If the goal was to get more people to use desktop linux / PCs making them more like and iPhone would be good. But I don’t think that’s a good goal to have.

Windows installers have GUIs and Windows didn't have a store until recentñy.

I've used an app store (or rather an 'apt store') since 1999, it's the reason I moved from redhat to debian in the first place.

I'm not sure that "desktop computers" as we know it were around in the 60s (I certainly wasn't), but in the early 90s software tended to come from floppy disks, before that it was a C90 cassette on a spectrum.

Microsoft Store and Valve Steam do not contain (shock!) browsers, office, tools, etc. That I believe is a distinction between distribution and store - "store" agenda is not aligned with users.

As a user, I could not hate Snap more, along with whoever thought it was a good idea to release their crapware "for Linux" through Snapcraft only. If "desktop Linux" is going to be anything like Ubuntu and whatever Canonical stands for, I most definitely do not want it. That said, I do not really know what "the year of the Linux desktop" is supposed to refer to as I have been a happy Linux desktop user for way over two decades.

This makes me wonder. If Linux will become mainstream then won't it lose its charm? I'm using Linux because of the package management. If something replaces that with a closed "app store" it might attract proprietary companies and those companies will attract regular users then I may stop caring about Linux.

I would like to think that there will be maintained Linux distributions out there that we currently have today that do not use or depend on such closed "app stores". I think we will not have to worry about this dystopian future just yet as there are like-minded people out there working on Linux distributions and do the packaging for them to keep the repositories up-to-date, and so forth. If something were to happen to Linux itself (quite possible given recent developments), then someone might just fork (I am not a lawyer, so I am not sure about the legalities). We will see. I certainly hope that it will retain its philosophy; "closed app stores" are definitely not it. :/

People really have learnt the wrong lessons from the iPhone.

The iPhone launched without the AppStore. The AppStore was not the cause of Apple's success, Usability and Power were - in the sense that it allowed users to do more things (access the web from anywhere) with less effort (no booting times or ceremony). It was the first mainstream device that made it really easy to browse the web; that is what made it successful.

The AppStore was just a play to entrench that initial success by coopting third-party developers and ensure they could only sharecrop on Apple's land: "If you do anything serious with our platform, we get 30%". That's it. Nothing to do with usability. The AppStore is actually a terrible model from a usability perspective, because it collapses discovery so much that it does not scale. "Tap and run" could have been implemented as a web protocol without a centralized UI and it would have worked just fine.

The same is true of Snap. Linux does not need a centralized store, from Canonical or anyone else; that's just a play for them to get a pound of flesh from third-party developers. It has been tried so many times before in the Linux world, and it has never succeeded. Even Nokia threw a lot of money at it, and failed.

What Linux really needs, as you say yourself, is to make it easy for developers to guarantee integrity of their solutions once they reach the user. That's why Snap is getting some traction: because it promises to move power from packagers to developers and to make it easier to guarantee that a program will Just Work, without having to deal with the packaging vagaries of this or that distribution or risking that an overzealous maintainer will "improve" your stuff with crippling patches.

If Canonical were sincere in their attempts to make Linux succeed, they would concentrate on that side of things and drop the AppStore shenanigans. But that's not what they are really after.

Don't you afraid it would be like browser addons - developers selling users to spyware companies?

No, but that's probably because I've grown up in the wild west of the '90s, where apps lived or died on their reputation. Any betrayal of users' trust would result in immediate removal and condemnation.

Also, it's not like modern developers don't sell users down the river. In fact, that's one of the very few sustainable business models that the AppStore forces you to have.

You missed the point where Canonical brought their own apt-get that just installs the snap anyways. So no, you can't install stuff through your traditional package manager.

> If desktop Linux is ever going to be mainstream

I do not want that to be the target. Going mainstream never helped with the quality of anything. Quite the contrary: mainstream means lowest common denominator.

If you want to compromise on how much you control of your desktop os for more vendor support you already have windows and macos.

> If desktop Linux is ever going to be mainstream there needs to be an easy to use "app store" where users can use a GUI to install apps which need to be sandboxed like on a mobile phone with defined permissions

If this is what you're looking for out of a computer, then why not just use a phone, tablet, or something like ChromeOS?

Because there are lots of things a computer can do comfortably that a phone, tablet or chromebook can't.

Sometimes there can be tradeoffs between convenience and security, but in the case of an app store the convenience actually enhances the security, because it diminishes the chance of people running random harmful commands from the Web.

There are a lot of things a metal lathe can do that other tools can't. But that doesn't mean a lathe is a good tool for everybody. In fact, it couldn't possibly be, because there are trade-offs between usefulness and safety. You just can't make a lathe that's safe for the casual user but useful to a professional user.

Pop!_OS integrates flathub into their "app store" [0]

[0] https://blog.system76.com/post/616861064165031936/whats-new-...

I wish every OS had comprehensive sandboxing so that you could just run any untrusted and potentially mallicious executable from the web and enable and disable features at will.

>If desktop Linux is ever going to be mainstream

Who says it needs to be? What if what appeals to Linux desktop users is precisely what differentiates it from the mainstream?

Snap is regressive. What we have now works better, faster, lighter, and more secure. No, you can't have a convenient means of shipping your proprietary electron 10G garbage monster to end users. We don't need it to be "mainstream".

Linux distributions had an "app store" for about 27 years with a reasonable GUI for at least 18.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaptic_(software)

Sandboxing is a laudible goal but curation is more likely to result in a system that isn't pwned in the context of current sandboxing being at present being vastly insufficient to contain real threats.

I'm not sure in what fashion flatpak is behind snap given that the former supports custom software sources served over simple existing servers, local and offline installs, runtimes, fine grained permissions via portals, and turning off automatic updates.

>A lot of people are mad at Canonical for not open sourcing the backend but no one seems to be offering to build one.

This is a very strange defense to a legitimate criticism. In what universe would anyone on earth offer to spend their own time to fork snap and write their own backend instead of using flatpak, appimage, apt or 17 other choices.

Is the best solution then (in terms of what current Linux users probably want) to introduce permissions to existing repository applications? Best of both worlds: reuse of system libraries, security updates to upstream packages without having to update the application itself, and pseudo-sandboxing for extra security.

Or a kick ass software manager that automagically integrates with flatpak, snap craft, and all the others. Maybe even Steam.

This was done 19 years ago. It was called Lindows. It came with a fancy GUI and custom packaged applications using a private app repository. Wal-Mart sold PCs pre-installed with it. I bought one.

Needless to say, that was not enough for Linux to go mainstream.