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?
I think the second point is the biggest for me: it’s almost like Canonical wanted to have a single dominant store for apps, as the ecosystem they are building supports only one. And, apparently, that one server is also closed?
So if you try to make an alternative source and give instructions to people how to configure their snap installation to use it (I found this information very hard to find for some reason…), your “store” probably won’t have the same packages Canonical’s has, so users won’t be able to find the packages and I imagine updates are also now broken?
Contrasting this with flatpak: you just install apps from wherever. Or from flathub. Or your own site. Doesn’t matter. No business incentive behind—built into the tools—to make everyone use flathub.org.
Yes, Flathub is important but there are many other repos. Nothing for non development though.
I maintain a hopefully complete list here