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Plex for Linux Now Available as a Snap (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Today, a very popular app, Plex Media Server, gets the Snap treatment. In other words, you can install the media server program without any headaches -- right from the Snap store. "In adopting the universal Linux app packaging format, Plex will make its multimedia platform available to an ever-growing community of Linux users, including those on KDE Neon, Debian, Fedora, Manjaro, OpenSUSE, Zorin and Ubuntu. Automatic updates and rollback capabilities are staples of Snap software, meaning Plex users will always have the best and latest version running," says Canonical.
TAR.gz RPM Deb PPA flatpak Snap AUR ebuild tar.bz2. configure make make install. It's all fun in the Linux packaging factory.
I don't know what Plex is, but I have a general question. Would anybody want an open source project to be distributed as a snap? I installed Skype on my kubuntu 18.04 system, and it insisted on it. But Skype isn't open source, so okay - it's easier for them to package it once and have it work everywhere. But in the meantime, I see that the snap has set up a loopback filesystem. In fact that conflicted with an encrypted filesystem I used to map using /dev/loop0, until I changed that. But do I really want extra filesystems showing up in the 'df' command just because I've installed a bunch of apps that come as Snaps.
Okay. Plex seems to be a server app, so maybe. But Skype - easy for them, pain in the ass for me.
I recently went to install the Atom text editor to give it a whirl. That also wanted to install as a snap. Luckily there was a regular deb available and I installed that instead. But seriously - any open source project ought to be included in the distro's repository and kept up to date there. I guess snaps could be handy for things you can't afford to keep up to date - to prevent breakage. But there are ways to prevent taking repo updates for individual apps. I guess snaps can protect you from library updates breaking things too, but seriously - open source desktop apps ought to be either less mission critical or more backward-compatible than the kinds of things that snaps are useful for. Wishful thinking?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Wait. Are you a... USER?
sig: sauer
In adopting the universal Linux app packaging format, ...
That may be the Canonical definition of "universal", but not really the canonical definition. Just sayin'.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Yep. "App" should definitely be used as a pejorative term in the next Tron movie.
sig: sauer