Slashdot Mirror
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.
You don't need snap to install VLC as it's already included in the repositories.
But this gets you an old version of VLC. For the latest version you have to either compile from source, or (possibly) switch to the unstable repository. It is a pain - the snap solves this problem thereby making running VLC on Linux easy. It is a necessary solution if we are ever going to see Linux used by non-IT people.
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.
There are far more things wrong with Windows. For starters, applications were not self contained. Recall DLL hell? I have not used Windows in some time but a major problem with it was that applications would put shared libraries (DLLs) in the Windows system directory resulting in numerous conflicts. Self-contained exe files are the solution - not the problem.
I personally like the idea of having a solid, well tested base system supported by repositories. The applications are mostly static and rarely see updates. And if I want to run the latest version of an application, a snap allows me to do that without modifying the base system. It is great - I can try out applications then remove them without buggering up my OS.
My only issue with snaps (or flatpak) is that the applications do not integrate with the desktop environment as well as they should. This is noticeable in the open and save dialog boxes. Some implementations are good but not all. Overall, I am quite pleased with how they work. It is great to have the latest version of LibreOffice always available.
But I have to say, if "NotePad++" is one of the top 10 snaps.... not a good sign. I tried it out just for the hell of it. Great to have on Windows but on Linux - what a POS.
Even worse, the SNAP version of VLC cannot play video files from an NFS mount. This bug has been posted for months with no resolution, demonstrating once again Ubuntu's obsession with shiny distractions over making their distribution truly functions.