I’ve gathered that a lot of people in the nix space seem to dislike snaps but otherwise like Flatpaks, what seems to be the difference here?
Are Snaps just a lot slower than flatpaks or something? They’re both a bit bloaty as far as I know but makes Canonicals attempt worse?
Personally I think for home users or niche there should be a snap less variant of this distribution with all the bells and whistles.
Sure it might be pointless, but you could argue that for dozens of other distros that take Debian, Fedora or Arch stuff and make it as their own variant, I.e MX Linux or Manjaro.
What are your thoughts?
When I install this snap am I getting a kernel driver, a native raw binary, or a containerized user application that conforms to a communication interface? Who knows! They’re all mostly undifferentiated in the store.
What about a third party store? Only if you fork the snap daemon and change the hard coded URL. And good luck with that mandatory Canonical contributer agreement you have to sign.
Want to pick when your apps update? Nope. That’s the official stance. They will never support that. But here’s a way to manually block network access to the daemon if you really really need to. But then everything will update at once when you give it access again.
Want a specific version of a snap? See above. Explicitly will never be an option.
“I guess there’s a fee to pay to get access to quality apps.” Incorrect. There is no real vetting process for what’s added to the store, there’s barely even minimal checking that you’re not overwriting someone else’s snap. You do have to sign the Canonical contributor agreement, and setup an identity to submit as, but even if your snap is proven to be malware there a good chance it will stay in the store, or can be immediately re-uploaded.
Not to mention snap is overly complicated for what it is. If it breaks good luck as you probably can’t fix it without starting over.