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amelius

Let them first fix Snap.

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There is no reason for anyone on any distro to use snap.

It will die so just leave it alone.

They need to kill snap ...

Yes, please. Linux distros is better with macos approach. And making appimage first class makes a lot of sense.

I'll avoid it at this point anyway. The Rust coreutils is another reason for that. Snap, monetizing updates, telemetry, enough is enough.

Yup. After almost 20 years, I have had enough of their crap. All of my new machines are getting Debian. Can’t wait until I am free of Ubuntu.

Appimages are bloated and unreliable. You can't guarantee that your app will run on any machine because it might depend on different system libraries.

Flatpak uses shared stable runtimes that are the same everywhere and don't take up space more than once. It also comes with a native update system and sandboxing. Snap is the same thing but worse.

> Snap is the same thing but worse

IIRC Snap relies heavily on AppArmor for sandboxing, so on anything non-Ubuntu the sandboxing is non-existent.

My problem with flatpak is that the underlying runtime has a limited lifespan. I used the Sublime Text 3 flatpak for many years, and it was deprecated a few months ago because the runtime it was using was no longer supported. This caused people to update the flatpak to Sublime 4, which is good, but I only have a license for 3. In the end I just downloaded the binary for 3 from their website, and it still just worked. Flatpak still doesn't save you from bitrot.

There's a project called "anylinux appimages" that aims to make the most compatible appimages. They also use DwarFS for faster opening and smaller file sizes.

See: https://pkgforge-dev.github.io/Anylinux-AppImages/

> Flatpak uses shared stable runtimes that are the same everywhere and don't take up space more than once.

https://pkgforge-dev.github.io/Anylinux-AppImages/disk-usage...

Also flatpak runtimes are NOT stable, they do nonsense like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/1pwgdwb/gpu...

AppImages do not work anywhere close to how macOSs .apps do, and even if they did the approach isn't correct for how things work on Linux.

I think ubuntu wants to kill desktop linux. No other explaination of why they push firefox inside snap, which then proceeds to constantly crash, when firefox used normally works completely fine.

I haven't tried chromium but I presume it's the same issue.

At work I'm forced to use ubuntu and I placed snapd on hold and added mozilla's own apt repository to my configuration to get firefox.

At least in the past few months the dbus crashes (been using systemd on debian for several years just fine, this never happened) that render the system unusable and un-rebootable have stopped… I guess when my company will decide to upgrade to 26.04 there will be more instability and problems.

Firefox installed as a snap feels sluggish to me. When I install a Ubuntu system, the first thing I do is to uninstall any snap and install the apt versions of things, possibly adding official PPAs or using Guix to install software.

why bother with ubuntu at all ? If you want ubuntu but without snap out of the box, Zorin is 1 option. Or if you also hate gnome, linux mint.

Indeed. Thought not in all cases I can decide what OS to use. An employer might prescribe which one to use. And any distro will be better than being forced to use Windows.

sandboxing a browser makes total sense. my firefox and chromium running as snaps never crashed a single time for as long as I can remember, and I use both every day, at the same time.

Both have performance issues when installed as snaps across my 24.04 and 26.04 machines.

I sandbox with firejail. There is no reason to use snaps. Also in firejail I never experienced a crash.

> never crashed a single time

I'm very happy for you. How does that help the people who do encounter issues?

Browsers literally sandbox their own tabs.

And the entire Linux user space is already sandboxed by design. This is why you type sudo.

If os and software developers actually designed with the Linux filesystem in mind, there would be no need for Flatpaks and Snaps and AppImages.

There's a whole directory for user applications and their libraries.

/usr

> I haven't tried chromium but I presume it's the same issue

No issues with snap Chromium.

Thanks to snap I've learned of Librewolf. Couldn't install non snap Firefox, so just got ff fork instead.

Also, after a system update all PPAs (including Librewolf) got turned off, so I went like a year without updating the browser. Fun stuff.

Also, snap is now partially fixed. It used to take all your drive space with old versions of snaps. You needed a special script to remove them automatically.

Now there's no more than 2(?) old versions of snaps anytime. Progress!

But not to complain too much, Ubuntu still kind of works. I moved my laptop to Fedora, and almost did it with the desktop, but learned of Librewolf. Should probably remove the fedora root and home at some point. Don't remember any issues that were not caused by me (other than snaps). Compared to Windows with it's auto updates when you need PC for sth critical, ads everywhere and this annoying way of installing software not from terminal and having to update it manually separate from system updates. Ubuntu did a lot for Linux, maybe more it's community than canonical, but it will always have a place in my heart.

It is a good idea, unfortunately poorly executed.

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