Former Canonical Dev Is Working on a Script That Replaces Snaps with Flatpaks | Hacker News Reader

Former Canonical Dev Is Working on a Script That Replaces Snaps with Flatpaks

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39 pointsossusermivami18 comments

If you don't want snaps, vote with your feet and get off Ubuntu. Stop trying to fix something that doesn't want to be fixed.

With Ubuntu and RHEL clones out, what's in these days? Debian?

Linux Mint is basically Ubuntu without snaps

You run Mint on servers?

Of course there are use cases when Mint don't replace Ubuntu.

You probably can use Mint on a server but for me, the obvious Debian-like server distro is Debian itself. I can't imagine one advantage of running Mint on a server. Mint is focused on the desktop.

On the desktop, Mint really seems like Ubuntu without snaps, and a specific package management that is way more conservative when it comes to upgrades. And a focus on Cinnamon and Mate.

On the desktop I would formerly advise Ubuntu. Today, I would just suggest Debian, which is the distro I trust the most, or maybe Mint. I just don't see any scenario where Ubuntu could be better than either of them.

I use openSUSE Tumbleweed myself. I would not recommend it to a novice user. openSUSE Leap might be a solid choice but I never tried it so it's difficult to recommend it.

Incidentally, I discovered that GitLab happily supports their Runners being installed on Linux Mint. So plausibly that could be the smoking gun of people actually out there running mint on servers. Or maybe Dev workstation runners idk.

That’s fair lol, seems like the best alternatives are Debian and OpenSUSE on servers

Debian, alpine if you can stomach their userland.

Fedora (if you’re okay updating frequently), OpenSUSE

OpenSUSE has several flavors: Leap if you want a more traditional release, Tumbleweed for a rolling release, and MicroOS for an immutable system.

If you want enterprise support, Leap is binary compatible with SUSE Linux Enterprise.

I work at SUSE so I’m obviously biased here but I really do think the OpenSUSE ecosystem hits the right balance for a very large majority of users and use-cases.

I used SLES at a previous employer and it was absolutely rock solid.

Personally, after more than a decade on Ubuntu, I finally moved to Fedora last year. While I don't have any major complaints, Tumbleweed does look tempting.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36564579 (8 points, 0 comments)

I hate closed platforms as much as the next guy, but I wouldn't count on this getting very far. Snap has a lot of functionality that Flatpak doesn't (and vice-versa). They fill almost completely different niches, and I highly doubt desktop Linux users were the cash cows Canonical was counting on in the first place. It's nice that this exists, but it's not the David vs Goliath story many might spin it to sound like.

> Snap has a lot of functionality that Flatpak doesn't (and vice-versa).

Like what?

The only business proposition for desktop Linux is winning the hearts and minds that make enterprise purchasing decisions and getting community members to do some of the heavy lifting of package maintenance and peer support.

other stranger ideas include selling hardware with good linux support

> I highly doubt desktop Linux users were the cash cows Canonical was counting on in the first place.

Well, actually, that was very much Canonical's original business plan: polishing the Linux desktop so it could be sold to consumers and businesses.

It just so happened that the virtual-machine/cloud "revolution" took place shortly after, and precisely because Ubuntu had gained mindshare by being "easy" and "polished", they had an advantage (as people preferred to use something they were already comfortable with) and became the most popular distribution for cloud deployments.

Unfortunately they've since been unable to capitalize on that, partially because of bouts of "NIH" like Snaps.

Containers are “users” make a cgroup and namespace to isolate their processes.

Oh wait; let’s make a new arbitrary DSL to tokenize and parse, and update operating system state with; the bajillion people who can use Ruby and Python would be helpless without it!

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