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Fedora QA Lead Pans Canonical 'Propaganda' On Snap Apps (happyassassin.net)
Long-time Slashdot reader JImbob0i0 shares a scathing article by Red Hat's Fedora QA "community monkey"/senior QA engineer on Canonical's announcement about their application delivery mechanism "snap"...
...and how it's going to unite all distributions and kill apt and rpm! This is, to put it diplomatically, a heaping pile of steaming bullshit... The press release and the stories together give you the strong impression that this thing called Snappy is going to be the cross-distribution future of application delivery, and it's all ready for use today and lots of major distributions are buying into it... The stories have headlines like "Adios apt and yum? Ubuntu's snap apps are coming to distros everywhere" and "Snap Packages Become Universal Binary Format for All GNU/Linux Distributions"...
Now, does Snappy actually have the cross-distribution buy-in that the press release claims (but never outright states) that it has? No... The sum total of communication between Canonical and Fedora before the release of this press release was that they mailed us asking about the process of packaging snappy for Fedora, and we told them about the main packaging process and COPR. They certainly did not in any way inform Fedora that they were going to send out a press release strongly implying that Fedora, along with every other distro in the world, was now a happy traveler on the Snappy bandwagon... They just decided to send out a wildly misleading press release and actively encourage the specialist press to report that Snappy was all set to take over the world and everyone was super happy with that.
Now, does Snappy actually have the cross-distribution buy-in that the press release claims (but never outright states) that it has? No... The sum total of communication between Canonical and Fedora before the release of this press release was that they mailed us asking about the process of packaging snappy for Fedora, and we told them about the main packaging process and COPR. They certainly did not in any way inform Fedora that they were going to send out a press release strongly implying that Fedora, along with every other distro in the world, was now a happy traveler on the Snappy bandwagon... They just decided to send out a wildly misleading press release and actively encourage the specialist press to report that Snappy was all set to take over the world and everyone was super happy with that.
Unification is what linux desperately needs in order to make it possible for third party closed source vendors to target the platform. Otherwise they just make ubuntu binaries, and that's it.
The few times that I've ever needed or wanted to install anything that was only shipped in binary form, the packages that were put out for one or both of the popular distros (usually Ubuntu and Fedora) could easily be packaged and run on others distros (such as Gentoo and Arch which I use). Actually, by the time I wanted to install those things on my distro, somebody else had already made an ebuild or packaged it in AUR, so.... do we really "desperately" need whatever this snap apps thing is? Doubtful.
Would greater consistency between the Linux distros make it an easier platform to target with binaries? Of course! But what we've seen happen with systemd, GNOME 3, and now these "snaps" is that this unification is happening around the worst technology around.
A typical Linux distribution today consists of the Linux kernel, which is actually quite good, and everything layered on top of that is shit.
We hear about systemd causing one problem or another far too often. For example, it was just a few weeks ago that we learned that a systemd change broke software like screen and tmux!
X is a trainwreck, but Wayland is even worse. With X we get a prehistoric relic, but at least it's somewhat usable. With Wayland all we get wheel spinning pointlessly in mud, going absolutely nowhere.
Then there's GNOME 3, which is by far the worst user experience we've ever seen from a Linux desktop environment. It's a tablet-oriented UI that nobody actually uses on a tablet, yet desktop users who try to use it are forced to endure the tradeoffs made to try to cram a desktop environment onto tablets.
People were attracted to Linux in the first place because it offered software that was better than what we found in Windows or Mac OS at the time. But that was 15 years ago, and times have changed. OS X and Windows provide a much better user experience these days for desktop users. FreeBSD is now indisputably better on servers.
These efforts to unify Linux have ruined it, I think.
"Unification" is exactly what GNU/Linux *doesn't* need. Innovation creeps up in the FOSS world through other projects, NOT through iteratively improving one core. I'm not a fan, but it's undeniable that systemd didn't become popular simply by building on initscripts. Even OpenRC doesn't do that; it uses sysvinit, but the scripts are entirely its own. Iterative development is not enough to create large breakthroughs. In the systemd example I gave it's really not that large because it doesn't actually do anything new, but it's still such a large change that it wouldn't be possible if it wasn't its own project.
In the "wonderful" unified Linux world, you'd be stuck with what you're given. If upstream doesn't want your contributions, you no longer have the (realistic) option to fork. You either get it into the mainline release, or your innovation or improvement simply doesn't get used because everyone's already "agreed" on this base.
Unification destroys the concept of distributions, destroys the ability to fork and build, destroys the ability to greatly change and innovate. I may not be a fan of some of the recent changes (such as the systemd cult), but I absolutely respect the shit out of the environment that makes that change possible or even easy. Whether you're running OpenRC, systemd, sysvinit, runit, or whatever, you're still GNU/Linux at the end of the day. The ability to pick and choose your software in Linux is a feature, not a bug. If you don't want configurability or choice, go use a BSD or literally any other OS.
The main issue with "targeting" is itself. Software should depend on as general a base as possible. For example, it shouldn't be using low level dependencies with unstable APIs. Most applications (games being the biggest examples) can get by with dbus, udev, xorg/wayland, and SDL. Other libraries such as libav, libpng, and so on are rather stable if you target them correctly.
If we want to point the fingers at anyone, it's the closed sources guys modifying the libraries that they use and expecting every distro to use their modifications. In the same breath, Ubuntu is one of the worst distros to target *because* they modify the libraries so much. The rest of Linux land doesn't suffer all that much, if at all. Build your shit right and it'll work.
Trying to force GNU/Linux land to unify will destroy its software ecosystem. Hackers will move on and/or simply refuse to target the unified stack. I've heard of some developers actively putting code into their applications to exit early if it detects software that the author disagrees with. Things could get ugly fast.
What debacle?
Ubuntu releases snappy on their distribution, claims success around the world despite no one agreeing to it.
Redhat releases systemd and pulseaudio on their distribution, everyone around the world adopts it.
I can see which one is the debacle here. Oh and you think a couple of whining users matter? hahahahaha