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Comment by somedude82 | Hacker News Reader

Snaps are BS.

I did couple of months ago clean ubuntu 22.10 install. Somehow curl was installed from snap - of course I had problem saving curled files due sandboxing. Installed mosquitto2 (MQTT server) - of course it did not read my custom confs from /etc/... anymore - due sandboxing. Installed Libreoffice from snap - it Calc (excel alternative) was exctremely slow somehow - switched to Libreoffice from APT repo - it was fast as it should be.

and to not start with the autoupdate nonesense that you can not disable.

I have been ususing Kubuntu since 2010 and thinking of switching to some other distro with KDE and all because of SNAPs

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I bailed after 20.04 and have been a happy Pop_OS (Ubuntu minus all the snaps out of the box), Fedora and Arch user ever since. Definitely try Pop as it's the most direct move from Ubuntu--really the only diff you'll notice is a different default system theme and background picture.

Pop mixes flatpaks with regular packages and its very confusing to understand which is which

That's true for the store (Pop Shop), but not for the CLIs (apt and flatpak). If an app has only a .deb or flatpak version, it's not clear which will be installed. If there are multiple versions, you get a dropdown menu to select one. Unfortunately, some apps are listed more than once (different packagers, I assume).

Ubuntu, on the other hand, will sneakily install snaps via apt.

Happy Fedora user, here. I love it. I do miss the AUR from Arch, though. I miss absolutely nothing about Ubuntu.

Fedora has flatpak and it works pretty well (using KDE here). However, Slack and a password manager I prefer are snap only.

I really dislike snaps.

Sandboxing still makes sense and is the right direction into a better Linux ecosystem. However the Ubuntu approach is flawed.

Similar boat, after about a decade on Kubuntu I switched to Manjaro, and there had been very little downsides (things like Postgresql major upgrade requires manual migration for example, which I didn't notice while updating the system) and a lot of advantages (or just one really, the AUR). Moving your right dotfiles (KDE ones are painful though) you can do the switch in less than a day and the change won't really be noticeable.

I currently run a small research cluster, and snaps are great. They make spinning up for instance a new redis instance super quick and painless. I think that snaps are mostly a server use, and the desktop users don't like it because they're not server admins and have different needs.

It looks like that flatpaks have mostly won the desktop market, but on the server side docker and snaps are both really nice.

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