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Comment by robert_foss | Hacker News Reader

Snap is not a standard, and never will be (RedHat will always ship flatpak for example). So Snap is no universal solution.

At the same time snap packages have serious downsides for end users.

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I think this comment demonstrates the parent’s point.

Well, no. The parent point was that Snap is a way out of this software packaging quagmire, but I am saying that Snap will never unify the linux distros.

A snap has Ubuntu-specific package dependencies. That's totally not a cross-platform concept. The only thing snap solves is sandboxing, but there are better ways to do that.

> Ubuntu-specific package dependencies

Could you briefly summarize those for us?

Before every distro had their own package management system and repository.

Then 99% went with Flatpak, except one, Ubuntu with their own proprietary solution called snap.

It's not the same thing. We have a decent (yeah not perfect, I'll spare commenters the effort of posting that same old tired flatpak rebuttal) cross distro packaging solution, but Canonical always wants to play different and not collaborate with the other standards. So here we are.

You can also just install Flatpak on Ubuntu and never think about Snap ever again if you so choose. Someone putting forth effort to maintain their own bespoke repository isn't really that big a deal.

In 10 years the "Ubuntu Store" will be a pretty frontend on top of Flatpak just like Gnome Software, and just like every NIH Canonical product made before it.

Unless you want Firefox or some other apps where the deb package is a thin frontend around a snap install command.

Fair criticism, but wouldn't you be installing the Flatpak versions of those apps anyway? I get the loss of the distro-provided builds but in abstract I can't find some fundamental reason distros can't drop packages from their repos.

I'd rather a package report as `does-not-exist` and suggest I install it from snap over it installing it silently from snap without my input

What 99%? Fedora, Mint, eOS, Pop use Flatpak. Ubuntu (and derivatives other than aforementioned ones) and Solus use Snap. In every other distro, including but not limited to popular ones like Debian, SUSE, Slackware, Arch, Void, Gentoo, both are optional. Neither Flatpak nor Snap is standard.

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