They'll shutter Snap and adopt Flatpak in ~3 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux_naming_controversy
Flatpaks are a cross distro sandboxable package format. That's why it won the cross distro package war. How is that crap?
which you can record in an alias for easy access.
Not great, but you implement it once and are done with it.
From the software shop GUI, I can choose flatpak or dnf/apt from the dropdown. From the command-line, flatpak has its own commands (vs. apt silent under-the-hood behavior).
Flatpak is better than Snap. I use Flatpak for commercial software (Discord, Steam, etc.), but it remains my choice as a user.
We know the arguments: often distro packagers are late to update, some projects are very complex to be packaged and demand gazillion of resources to be built, upstream devs on contrary will surely keep they project package up-to-date, sandboxing is good for safety etc. BUT we also know the outcome: 99% of such packages are full of outdated and vulnerable deps, they are themselves mostly outdated, since they are not packaged by the upstream devs who just publish the code as usual, and they have many holes punched here and there because a browser that allow to download some files but you can't open them in other apps is useless, as a pdf reader who can't read a file because it's outside the right place. Beside that you get a 30+Gb desktop deploy instead of a 10Gb, dab performances, polluted home directory, very scarce ability to automate AND all of them still need a classic package manager since they can't handle the base system.
So why them? Because SOME upstream do not want to allow third party distribute their binaries, they are commercial vendor. They NEED such system to sell they products ensuring they can work as a cancer in an open ecosystem, not designed to be a ship for something but a unique individual desktop anyone tune as he/she want.
That's why they are crap.
The next step to classic package management is the declarative/IaC one, like NixOS or Guix System. Those who want Snap, Flatpack, Appimage, ... just want Windows, with all the bloats and issues of Windows.
Unless that snap allows lower level usage (services, kernel...)
Canonical will fail once again, but only after jerking the community around for multiple years.
Unity served well for years, it would have needed a rewrite anyway for the post x11 era, so indeed there have been wasted resources, but experiments are also important in technology, and many still love what was (is) the unity user experience.
> and they wasted time and effort on Mir and shuttered it in favor of Wayland
Mir is still there and it's used. It's now a Wayland compositor but it maintains its API, the different communication protocol doesn't change its purposes.
> and they wasted time and effort on Upstart and shuttered it in favor of systemd.
When Upstart started and was used no systemd existed or was designed, so it served many well for years. Not a waste.
They still maintain Mir, as a Wayland display server.
Unity was one of the most popular desktop environments and brought Ubuntu users a lot of value over the years. It even influenced the design of GNOME 3.
That said I do agree that the CLA has doomed most of their projects from gaining considerable adoption in the wider Linux community. At least while Canonical is still running the project.
Does `apt remove` remove the snap?
Exclusive control over the only available apps store?
Not going to happen.