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Comment by rubyist5eva | Hacker News Reader

of course the only comments so far are people complaining that Ubuntu sucks and their $PREFERRED_DISTRO is better

I for one think Steam as a snap is a great idea, and was pleasantly surprised with them taking the feedback about the Firefox snap to heart and actually putting in the work to speed it up.

I was gonna install 22.04.1 tonight (finally got fedup with Windows) but I'm gonna try this tonight instead and definitely give the Steam snap a try. The less I need to boot into Windows to play PC games the better.

Congratulations to the team on another release.

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I don't think it's 'my distro is better' as much as it is people who loved ubuntu pissed off in the direction they went with Snaps. At least, that's my personal position.

IMO, snaps have no reason to exist other than NIH. But, if they wanted to do it anyways, fine. But it should have always been opt in, and people could for example try out the Steam snap. Instead they made everything a snap mess that rarely works quickly or predictably .

I liked the idea of snaps as something like the AUR. Basically a straightforward way to get un-trusted/closed source software installed without giving some random installer root on my system. Apps like Steam, Spotify, Discord, maybe even Chrome make a lot of sense since they don't really fit into a traditional open source distribution model, but I wish they'd stick with apt for anything open source.

Flatpack already existing, and snap makes programs take 30x as long to run.

can you use Flatpack for command line apps yet?

Flatpak is focused on GUI apps only, for CLI apps you'd use whatever you're used to.

What makes a GUI app worth containerizing and CLI tools not worth containerizing?

> What makes a GUI app worth containerizing and CLI tools not worth containerizing?

Agree 100%, and podman/docker already exist.

The way I do it is to use [Distrobox](https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox) to use whatever distro's userspace has the thing I need (I use either the newer devel version of ubuntu or alpine), so if I need a newer version of a CLI tool I can get that without conflating it with the OS layer. It's a similar workflow to how OSX and Windows WSL do it.

So I'm just using the normal debian packages for everything, except it's in a nice split out container just for my userspace with access to all my data. This is the workflow from Fedora Silverblue, openSUSE's MicroOS and EndlessOS, which kind of forces you into the cloud native mindset, but you can run any distro this way.

> of course the only comments so far are people complaining that Ubuntu sucks and their $PREFERRED_DISTRO is better

I haven't seen a single comment like that. Distinguish "Ubuntu sucks" from "snaps suck". Also, the comments about alternative distros seem to be along the lines of "these distros are the most similar to Ubuntu except without the snaps."

>less I need to boot into Windows to play PC games the better.

Hard to give up smoking with a pack in your pocket.

not gonna get an argument from me there, but I have over 1000 steam games

In my opinion, it's probably better to stick with windows until the drawbacks of running windows outweigh the meaningful percentage of those 1000+ games you still play.

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