Official Ubuntu flavors must stop including Flatpak by default
theregister.com
theregister.com
The Register article is overly kind about this, I appreciate the "news not editorial" flavour but the real story is that Ubuntu apparently consider themselves apart from the community that makes their software and they should now be consigned to history by that community. Off to uninstall it in my network now.
I'm glad they're not an official flavor, canonical hasn't been doing a great job on their consumer desktop sector because their money is made via the server installs and distributions.
Joking aside, Pop is generally liked for its easy-to-use interface. System76 has made a well-polished suite of software, and they are in the process of replacing GNOME with their own DE to make it an even smoother experience.
Of course, if you use something else (I prefer openSUSE Tumbleweed), you can just stick to Flatpaks entirely without having to get concerned about snaps.
You can basically set up Ubuttnu or most other common Linuxes to be just like Pop OS by spending a few hours on it.
For people using another distro without customizing it much after the installer is done, then I would usually recommend Pop OS. I think it's the best "out of the box" Linux for most general-purpose computing like programming, email/web, Slack, etc.
But if you already switched to Debian and are happy, then there's probably no huge benefit to moving to Pop unless you are sick of tinkering and just want automatic system updates that keep you pretty up to date with recent kernels and packages without you having to do anything.
I’ve been dailying Pop on all my main machines for years now without any problems. Think of it as Uncononical’d Ubuntu in a way but they’re really committed to making a unique footprint
I've tried it. I really did not like it.
May I suggest that you try to separate your personal preferences, which are your own business and 100% fine but are yours, from a general canonical announcement such as "best consumer... experience" which is a sweeping generalization and is not true?
The existence proof that Pop OS is not the best consumer experience is this: the most widely-used desktop Linux in the world is ChromeOS.
It has something around 200-300 million happy users, and ChromeBooks now outsell Macs and have been doing since 2017 in the USA and 2020 worldwide.
ChromeBooks are pure Linux machines, with a desktop Linux based on Gentoo.
There are about 10x more ChromeBooks in use than all other desktop Linux distros PUT TOGETHER.
So, that proves by sheer numbers that the most popular consumer Linux is ChromeOS. It sells, for money, more than all the free distros put together.
> straight up bad faith.
You do not know my motivations, so kindly do not question them.
> Google is a tech giant with immense marketing capabilities.
So?
So is Red Hat, for instance.
> They sell laptops which obviously outsell anything like framework/purism/system76/pine64
[1] Wrong: not only Google sells Chromebooks. In fact I submit that it is a minority vendor of Chromebooks.
[2] Obviously outsell etc.
Why is this obvious? What do you feel is obvious here, and why?
> they would even if the product was garbage.
Evidence, please? On what basis do you make this claim?
> mechanical consequence of what google is
What is a "mechanical consequence"?
> they happen to have a product running it
"happen to have" is bogus. This took years, major effort, and the people behind it had to fight for it.
> it doesn't say anything about chromeos.
It 100% does. It says that Linux is ready for the desktop, and that it has been for years. It outsells the only other rival product to MS Windows; how much more ready can anything be?
The year of Linux on the desktop came and went and the Linux world was, as ever, too busy squabbling and arguing with itself to even notice.
Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of consumers are happily running Linux laptops and Linux phones and just use it, all day every day...
And all the distros are a rounding error.
I don't understand why you're choosing this hill to die on and what point you're trying to make. You mentionned chromeos is gentoo underneath. Why don't you attribute it's success to gentoo? You're nitpicking on everything i said even irrelevant stuff (who cares who actually builds chromebooks? they are still google-stamped). And come on, are you really comparing the power and influence of redhat and google on consumers? Virtually no-one on the street knows about redhat (or any kind of linux corp), now google...
Something as fundamental and basic like consumer operating systems is basically unmovable and what people use has little to do with what's available and mostly with historical inertia and the state of worldwide tech politics. You're saying it yourself, linux was ready for years. To move anything you will have to exert tremendous social influence. People don't choose their OS, they are mostly conciliating between their job, their education and their family's or friend's tradition. So once again: chromeos being widespread is not an indicator of it's qualities (i'm sure it's perfectly fine tho), but just a measure of google's influence.
You are imputing to me things I am not saying.
All I am saying is that ChromeOS is proof that Linux _is_ ready for the desktop. We can say it's ready because hundreds of millions of people are using it.
As such, all the noise about packaging systems is just nerds fighting. It doesn't make any difference. The revolution came and it went past and all those most bothered didn't even notice.
Some have said Android is the proof, but it's not a normal Linux distro and it's not on the desktop in significant numbers. It's its own thing.
And we're not talking about servers, which are a whole other battle in another place, where Linux has also won but in ways that don't directly affect Joe Q Public at all.
It's not about marketing. It's not about brand names. It's not about adverts. I don't think I've ever seen an advert for a Chromebook outside of places that already target techies anyway, and few of them.
As I said: I disagree, with your reasoning and your conclusions. But you seem to be be talking about something else entirely, and I am not even sure what.
FWIW, my unrequested opinion, is that I largely agree that Pop!_OS is one of, if not the, best consumer distros.
Wait, what?
I wrote the article. In what way do you feel I am being "overly kind"? You baldly state this as an assertion without any backup or argument or evidence to support it.
> I appreciate the "news not editorial" flavour
Not really, no. I added in the analysis and evaluation that I felt it merited.
> but the real story is that Ubuntu apparently consider themselves apart from the community that makes their software
Why do you feel that that is "the real story"? On what basis?
Ubuntu is not a community distro. Ubuntu is built and maintained by Canonical on the basis of Debian.
Debian is a community distro.
The Ubuntu remixes are, arguably, community distros, but a requirement of being an official remix is only using upstream Ubuntu packages. I specifically spelled that out in the article, with a link for citation, but the reason I know is that I approached Canonical and asked about making new remixes, years ago, and they told me no, for 2 reasons:
* One was that one of my planned remixes used proprietary freeware. This, for clarity, did in the end get launched as a product, but without Ubuntu branding, at Canonical's demand.
* The other one needed external repos because the versions in Ubuntu's repos are too old. Ubuntu would not take newer versions into their repos; the packages came from Debian, and Debian didn't have current versions, so for Canonical it was Somebody Else's Problem and there the discussion ended.
> and they should now be consigned to history by that community
If you don't want to use an Ubuntu remix, nobody is forcing you.
But millions do, more than any other free Linux distro. Ubuntu has merits. Its users like those. Some don't. Debian hasn't gone away. Neither has Slackware, one of the few distros that predate Debian.
That is how evolution works. We humans evolved from apes, which evolved from monkeys, which evolved from things very like lemurs, but all of those still exist because they are very good at doing what they do and being what they are. Monkeys are better at being monkeys than humans are at being monkeys.
Debian is better at being Debian than Ubuntu is, so Debian continues to exist.
Debian continues to be rather harder to install, which is why SpiralLinux exists.
Debian continues to be rather dogmatic about init systems, which is why Devuan and antiX and MX Linux exist.
Debian continues to be built from rather out of date packages, which is why siduction exists.
And so on.
One of the core features of Ubuntu is that you get 5 years of support for your software after release. We go through great lengths to ensure that whatever you install the first day after release will continue working for 5 years. We simply can't ensure that with a third-party repositories like FlatHub. This is why the Ubuntu Technical Board decided a long time ago to not ship third party repositories by default. It doesn't matter if these are ppa's or Flatpak remotes. Any flavor that was previously shipping Flatpak, shipped it without any remote, even before the decision just posted.
As Aaron said it so well on the discourse: "Most of the Ubuntu flavors provide free technical support via forums and IRC channels. Most of our users are using software from the Ubuntu repos or Snap Store and we are equipped to help them. We know what to expect from the software our users run and can give targeted and efficient advice on how to resolve issues. Some of us can even kick things into shape in the archives if there’s a legitimate problem with our packages, or we know who to talk to.
With Flatpaks, the situation is much more dismal from a technical support perspective. We have little-to-no clue what quirks the software vendor(s) will have introduced since we don’t work closely with them. We have no way to reach in and fix legitimate bugs aside from filing bug reports and hoping that they will be answered. We’re going to end up with frustrated support staff and even more frustrated users. And all because they didn’t know that if they clicked a particular button in their flavor’s app store, they would be downloading unsupported software."
https://fosstodon.org/@wimpy/109908489437633387 ?
> [...] and even more frustrated users.
Speaking of being a frustrated user, can we use snap yet without the weird hardcoded $HOME stuff? la https://nelsonaloysio.medium.com/installing-ubuntus-snap-on-...
> unsupported software
Gnome Software already labels this fine, same for Apple's App Store, Google Play, Microsoft's Store, etc.
Also speaking of being a frustrated user, can we talk about the system resource usage? snapd ruined my Ubuntu experience for a while. I finally disabled it before ultimately leaving Ubuntu altogether.
On topic: Ubuntu and flavours are free to remove flatpak from the default install but removing the existing gnome support seems childish and also requires a lot of work.
The only difference appears to be that since you only officially support snap you work closely with the vendors on their snap packages. If you only officially supported flatpak, you would work closely with vendors on their flatpak packages.
Snap remains the more capable tool: it supports server apps on machines with no GUI
You are imputing meaning to it that I did not put there.
Ubuntu is a very popular and successful server Linux, used on millions of VMs.
I strongly suspect that those VMs are not built with Snap and don't use it for much. I think they're build from .deb packages, probably deployed with Puppet or Chef or Juju or something.
But Snaps work on servers, and Ubuntu Core is built only from Snaps. That is all I said. I didn't make any claims of how people deploy Ubuntu on servers.
Please don't put words in my mouth.
* updates are pushed/applied and services restarted on an arbitrary schedule which means you can't test updates prior to rolling them out or otherwise control when a service is taken offline by an update
* snapd doesn't log the actions it takes to standard OS logging facilities and the internal logs accessible via "snap changes" are cleared after 72 hours so you can't tell what actions it has taken
* snapd pollutes home directories with a directory called "snap" that can't be moved/symlinked/hidden.
snapd is a poorly conceived project written by people that are profoundly ignorant of how real services and servers are actually operated. Despite having the above flaws repeatedly pointed out, the developers have shown zero interest in taking actual concrete actions to address them.
Are there any bugs open on Launchpad for any of these? If not, and you seem both knowledgeable and opinionated on this, open some! I will happily mark them as affecting me too.
Personally, I run an `apt full-upgrade -y` every day on my working boxes, and I update snaps and flatpaks in the same command, so this never affects me personally, but they are valid points.
I can also write about them and possibly spur Canonical into some action, but I'd need some public discussion of the issues with Canonical staff.
E.g. bug reports on Launchpad. ;-)
The home directory pollution problem was pointed out by many people at the very beginning of the project specifically complaining that that needed to change immediately because of the concern of that decision becoming ossified into the codebase. The developers promised to look into it and now here we are almost a decade later with that stupid directory still polluting home directories because now it's too hard to revisit and would break too many things. :-/
Finally, the whole issue with snapd not explicitly logging package updates and other actions to OS facilities (that can be forwarded to security services) in favor of its own internal log that it self-purges every 72 hours is just pure insanity. There is simply no way having snapd running in any sort of regulated environment would ever pass an audit.
I need citations.
I am not saying I doubt you, but if these objections are to be reported upon, I have to be able to point to the receipts. I need to see the bug reports, or the mailing list posts, and specific examples of the "home directory pollution" and so on.
1) For auto updates, you can find plenty of examples via Google/Reddit searches that eventually tie back to discussions on the Ubuntu discourse forums where the snap developers weigh in and explicitly state they are not going to provide a way to disable snap auto updates.
2) For home directory pollution, IIRC the objections were raised on the bug tracker for snapd so once again it should be possible to dig up the discussions around that pretty easily.
3) For the 72 hour thing, you can find people complaining about the lack of proper logging easily enough where eventually someone mentions the 72 hour auto purge problem. I verified it myself by going through the source code for snapd with the comments in the code mentioning trying to keep memory usage down. I recall scarcely believing anyone would do something that bone headed but here we are. This may be a case where no one has "officially" raised an issue on their forums or bug tracker though that ties the two things together though.
Hope that helps you track that down.
While I see uptake of Flatpaks, I rarely see anyone pointing at a snap. Is anyone using Snap (out of free will)? Why do you prefer it?
This is also the main issue I have with snap. In their attempt to make it ubiquitous, Ubuntu are using it even for the smallest console apps with almost no dependencies.. I've even seen it used for go apps which are statically linked so they really have none. It's just a lot of overhead for no reason then.
I can't parse that sentence. Are there typos in it?
> Is anyone using Snap (out of free will)?
Ubuntu representatives told me at the Ubuntu Summit in Prague last year that their numbers suggest that Snap usage in the real world by Ubuntu users is around 10x more than all Flatpak usage.
They tun the only public Snap store. (There are others but they are not public.)
Flathub does publish stats, e.g. https://klausenbusk.github.io/flathub-stats/#ref=ca._0ldsk00...
I have no proof of this, but they seemed confident. I linked to my article about Ubuntu firmly backing Snap in the story at the top of this page, which I wrote.
Yes, couldnt edit anymore. took->room
I am not particularly pro-Snap. I am not particularly pro or anti anything in this space.
I repeatedly said that Flatpak has strong popular support. It does. I see it often.
What I tried to point out was the ways Canonical feels that Snap is superior to Flatpak.
There is a lot of FUD in this debate. More than usual.
Personally, once I discovered Martin Wimpress' `deb-get` tool, I removed both snap and flatpak from my own main Ubuntu boxes.
But then I joined the freebie Ubuntu Pro deal and then snapd gets reinstalled, so it didn't seem worth fighting it. But Pro has nothing I personally need, so I may yet purge them both again.
If nothing else, I enjoyed the faster startups, the cleaner `mount` output, and the simpler update routine.