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Comment by donmcronald | Hacker News Reader

The whole Snap thing is a great example of why Linux will never become mainstream. The idea is ok, but the implementation leaves a ton of collateral damage that breaks a lot of things.

For example, I installed Ubuntu 22.04 (in a VM) and installed VNC server so I could access it remotely. Surprise! Firefox and Chromium (snaps) don’t work. So one of the things I rely on is broken and I bet it’s going to stay broken for a long time.

It’s been like that for 20 years. VNC is old and boring and the devs creating things like SystemD, Snaps, etc. don’t care if they break it because they think their “progress” is more important than having a working system.

Semi related, why are all the Remote Desktop solutions on Linux so awful?

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> The whole Snap thing is a great example of why Linux will never become mainstream.

A generalization too broad, as pretty much no other distro except Ubuntu uses it. If anything, it's more emblematic of Canonical's neverending desire to reinvent the world and the NIH syndrome.

> Semi related, why are all the Remote Desktop solutions on Linux so awful?

I've never had any issues with plain old X forwarding over SSH. As long as you have compression enabled, performance for most applications is fine.

The distro doesn’t matter. There’s always some advancement that’s considered so important that breaking existing apps is viewed as tolerable collateral damage by the devs.

Because most Linux users use ssh for remote work.

And before snap and systemd were introduced, it would never reach mainstream because it was bad and difficult to use.

Let's stop with the "Linux is not mainstream" please. The world's largest video game reseller's flagship device runs arch linux with a kde plasma desktop and sells like cupcakes - likely more than 1M units already. It doesn't get more "mainstream" than this.

There are over a billion Windows devices. That 1M might seem like a big number, but it’s 0.1%.

You can't really bring a game console to the table as an argument for Linux popularity on the PC. That way BSD would be even more popular because it's shipped on every Play Station. Or whatever OS Nintendo uses on the Switch.

Sure, the Linux kernel is on almost any smart device in the world making it the most popular, but in the PC/laptop space, its market share is still absolutely tiny (<3%).

No, the PS and Switch don't use a BSD userspace and even less a standard BSD desktop such as Lumina. On the other hand SteamOS leverages a standard desktop Linux stack - KDE Plasma, PipeWire, Mesa, Glibc .. exactly the same software that I have on my Arch Linux desktop's plasma session modulo a few patches to adapt to the hardware and form factor... https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/97450182/167292656...

> The whole Snap thing is a great example of why Linux will never become mainstream. The idea is ok, but the implementation leaves a ton of collateral damage that breaks a lot of things.

Right, just like how the Windows Store is the reason Windows will never be mainstream.

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