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Canonical Shares Top 10 Linux Snaps of 2018 (betanews.com)
One of the most refreshing aspects of Linux in 2018 was the popularity of Snaps. Canonical revealed that the containerized packages have been a smashing success. Today, the Ubuntu-maker highlights what it feels are the top 10 Snaps of 2018. From a report: "With 2018 drawing to a close, and many of us spending with family during the holiday season, I thought we'd take a look back over some of our favourite Linux applications in the Snap Store. Some have been in the store for over a year, and a few landed only recently, but they're all great," says Alan Pope, Canonical. [...] Canonical shares the Top 10 Snaps: Spotify, Slack, VLC, Nextcloud, Android Studio, Discord, Plex Media Server, Xonotic, Notepad++, and Shotcut.
The annoying thing with snaps is that it's basically going back in time in away. If you have 350 Snap apps then you likely have 350 different copies of the exact same libraries, many which are old and insecure. If a library needs updating then instead of updating it once on your machine, you need to update it 350 times assuming each Snap package gets updated in a timely matter, but they don't.
They seem to confuse something here.
Snaps are a concept that deliberately chose the opposite approach to the Linux/Unix one. Namely the mobile OS one.
Mainly because those who came up with it, clearly came from a Windows world, and are utterly clueless about Linux and things like good package managers (that allow multiple versions of the same package to be installed at the same time).
Of course they can still do that, if they like to teach themselves a lesson of suffering.
They can't, however, call things like Snaps, systemd, and Ubuntu as a whole "Linux". As it not only misses, but actively completely rejects the very point of Linux. If you want that, you can aswell just use macOS. Instead of ruining Linux for those who actually need to do work on it.
So srop redefining the term "Linux" to mean "Apple OS clone", Canonical!
First of all Linux has this great thing called a Distribution where all the software you'll likely ever need is just included and can be installed via a package manager.You don't need snap to install VLC as it's already included in the repositories.
Secondly Linux isn't application centric, it's data centric. You exchange data and operate on it via programs you already have. Your set of programs is fairly fixed. It's not like mobile OSes where every external service requires its own app.
Thirdly sandboxes don't work. At best they only keep you from having functionality you want, at worst people will rely on it somehow protecting their system which will give rise to malware exploiting loopholes in the sandboxes. (i.e. Cryptominers, Rowhammer, Spectre, Meltdown, etc)
In short it's a fairly bad idea. It tries to reproduce one of the worst aspects of Windows, namely that you ship around self-contained exe files which get executed on a double click.
I'll just continue building from source. Thank you very much.
Just when you thought nothing could be more horrible and bugger up the works than systemd, Canonical outdid themselves. Amazing! "Snaps" an abomination, a "solution" waiting for a problem. What friggin' moron thought that "snaps" were a good idea? "Talent" poached from Microsoft?
You keep using that word, "refreshing". I do not think it means what you think it means.
Nobody wants "snaps", nobody asked for "snaps". Snaps are fucking retarded. This must be the result of nepotism. There is no other logical explanation.
It's hard to get away from them. If you use the App center and don't take much notice you end up installing snaps when a normal install would have worked just fine. I get that a program like discord might want a snap before they get their act together but VLC......Why is there a snap for VLC? It's already on just about every distro.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
YOu do not belong on a linuex. Please return your computer to the store.
What you are doing to that computer is not fair. It's not right.
A snaap for notepad is like buying a piece of plastic wrapped in plastic, shipped in a plastic container.
Get help nicca
thats a ms-windows text editor, no wonder ubuntu is a bugfest, i bet many ubuntu developers write code for ubuntu on ms-windows with notepad++
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
funny
that's how I'd mod this...
if I had mod points
which I dont
since i'm posting as AC
I have an old account,
though I forgot...
somewhere
somehow...
it still exists...
oh well
either way
it's
funny
captcha : corrects
Well that was a surprise entry. Does Don Ho know his product has been re-wrapped? https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
All I need (next) are Irfanview and Panorama Pro - both authors are like "We Windows. Linux, NEVER!"
Stop trying to make Snaps happen.
It's not going to happen.
Captcha reads: contempt
Flatpak is the other "standard" being foisted on us in Linuxland. Don't know if its better than Snap, but then where is a resource going into a detailed comparison of the two? Links would be appreciated, thanks.
As for Notepad++, for Linux there already is Notepadqq, as a flatpak / flathub in the repos and come up in the list in Software Manager if you search for "notepad".
"refreshing"? No. "Success"? Not really.
Snap is a load of shit being supported by a marketing campaign.
Not at the machine and I get them mixed up. Notepadqq is the Notepad++-like editor.
https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/d...
Clearly, the 'benevolent dictators' in charge of the Snapper project have a severe case of cranium posterior inversion. Whatever technical merits snaps may have become completely irrelevant in the face of people who think *they* are the ones who will dictate how I manage my own system.
Oh, and the whole thing relies on a store that itself is a closed source service.
I appreciate everything that Ubuntu does to make Debian more accessible, and even with the ever growing list of things I have to fix with every new release, (such as uninstalling snapper,) Ubuntu is still an easier, smoother path. But this is definitely the point where I have to draw the line. If the distro becomes increasingly dependent on snaps to be useful, I have to give up on it.
Linux distributions come with a package management system. These range from good to great. apt is pretty awesome. Use it. Want a newer version of something? With Ubuntu, use a PPA.
And you rely on the snap package author to update each and every single included component in a snap package. A snap contains not only the app but every dependency required to run. Any time a library or other component gets updated, the snap is out of date and the user is at risk. Many snaps are given permission to work with your files anyway.
Snaps should only be used to test bleeding edge software releases and never for actual end users or production.
Twinstiq, game news
Bloated crapware that doesn't properly integrate with your desktop? No thanks...
Statically compile everything. "but the multiple copies of the libraries!" -- i dont care. space is no problem.
"but they are out of date!" -- a problem with or without static libraries. Arguably using static compilation means your system has less to update overall. Your applications are pulling down different versions of libraries inside them - get over it - that isn't a problem.
a bigger problem is fragmentation. that is our biggest problem with computer systems. everything else is secondary. space, security, bandwidth. those are linearly increasing problems - fragmentation gets exponentially worse.
my top 1 list. /snap/ entries, basically so much "df -h" was pretty much useless at giving me a quick overview of my mounts.
I did a "df -h" not long ago to check out my disk usage. I got back a whole lot of
Since I didn't recall every giving ubuntu permission to mount a bunch of crap (and none of those snaps seemed to be something I was using), I removed it.