Why I dislike snaps

There are many reasons one could choose to hate Snap packages, and this not one of them. It's like hating a webbrowser because it spawns 20 processes that (the horror) you would all see when you run ps. It's just a part of how container technologies work.

This is truly why I also hate snaps though. The snapd people and the mount people need to work out how to hide these by default.

This is an interesting way to show your fstab

Why I hate snaps/flatpak:

1
- package/appimage ~80mb
- snap/flatpak >500mb
2
- p/a - app + dependencies
- s/f - app + minimal linux distribution
3
- p/a - can be easily run from terminal
- s/f - flatpak run com.very.easy.to.remember.and.type.name

snap/flatpak >500mb

Don't know about Snap, but Flatpak download sizes decrease significantly after installing the main platform libraries, they can become really small; of course that's pretty much fully negated if you're installing Electron apps, but even then 500MB isn't very accurate, more like 150MB on average

flatpak run com.very.easy.to.remember.and.type.name

Yes I hate it, what is even more annoying is that you can do flatpak install someapp and it will search matches on its own, it shows them to you to let you decide, but after that you can't do flatpak run someapp because it "doesn't exist"
- Last one could easily be fixed tho
- There's a nice program called flattool that solves the name issue
- Then you do a flatpak list and it abbreviates the shit out of the identifiers so you can't use them either. Whoever designed that UX needs to lean back an contemplate life a bit.
- Snaps have a similar deduplication mechanism, and snaps allows calling apps from their names like you would do with regular packages.
  
  I think the reason for the second one is that while snaps are also meant to be used in servers/cli flatpak is built only with desktop GUI apps in mind.
- Yes, sizes might be inaccurate - it's been about a year last time I tried snap or flatpak. All I remember is that snap installs around 300 mb gtk3 runtime and it's often 2 or more of them, because different snaps might rely on different gtk versions + other dependencies.
  And I remember that when snap and flatpak compared, allegedly flatpak requires more storage space.
  
  I am aware that runtime sizes doesn't scale with number of packages past maybe 3-4, but I have only 4 appimages on my system right now and they take ~200 mb, it is absurd that I'd need 10 times more space allocated for the same (or worse) functionality.
- ln -s /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin/org.mozilla.firefox ~/.local/bin/firefox
Appimage literally requires more storage for the apps because it dublicates all dependencies so in terms of storage flatpak and dnaps win by FAR, there are valid reasons to criticize all three but your comment is a sad joke!
- Unless you trying to replace half your system with appimages, appimages take less space in practice .
snap/flatpak >500mb

And to make it worse, snap keeps copies of previous versions of all programs. Which can be good if you need to roll something back, but at least last time I used Ubuntu it didn't provide any easy way to configure retention or clean up old snaps.
- There is an Flatpack called FlatSweep on Flathub.
Runtimes are okay, the problem is there is no runtime package manager and often you have like 7 of them, which is horrible. But on modern hard drives also no problem.

Appimages cant be easily ran from terminal, you need to link then to your Path.

For Flatpak I made a tool that aliases their launch commands to be very easy.
- Appimages cant be easily ran from terminal, you need to link them to your Path.
  
  On many distros "~/.local/bin" is already in PATH, that's where I put my appimages, then make them executable and it just works.
Your point 1 and 2 are the same

a - app + dependencies

Which will be duplicated for everything installed application, and redownloaded for every new version. Whereas flatpak and snappy shares the dependencies between applications.

s/f - flatpak run com.very.easy.to.remember.and.type.name

Snappy makes easily run command line shortcuts. Flatpak could use some improvements there though.
- Yes.. kinda!?
  First point is space requirement, second one is a design issue. They are directly connected, I'm not arguing that.

I think Snap has the potential to be better than Flatpak. It's a real sandbox instead of the half-assed shit Flatpak has going on. The problem I have with Snap is that Canonical keeps the Server closed-source. I don't want a centralized app store where Canonical can just choose to remove apps they don't like. So as long as the Server is closed-source, I will stay on Flatpak

How is Snap's sandbox better than Flatpak's?
Is Flatpak not a container system?
- Kind of? Maybe?
  
  It has similar goals to something like docker, but goes about it very differently, and it's obviously meant for user-facing applications.
  
  You wouldn't use docker to install steam, but you can use flatpak.
- @MigratingtoLemmy @I_like_cats I wondered about that, but to me it just feels like an isolated file system based app structure, kinda like the .app folders in Macs. Does that sound right?
  
  And with permissions, you can stop the app from accessing anything outside of its specific little file system.
That and these damn annoying loop devices.
I don't know if sideloading snap apps is a thing, but it has been proven that creating a snap repo isn't particularly difficult. Snap server being closed isn't really an issue Imho.
- You can create a snap store proxy, but that still has to register and pull from Canonical's source.
Go restart your browser in the middle of the day because snap just updated it in the background.

Try it in enterprise where you have automated systems that deploy alert sensors and they instantly go off because each mount is 100% full.

Pretty much every alerting system I know also has a filter option to only apply automated discovery rules to certain filesystem types.

But yes, most don't first squashfs or mounted read-only snapshots by default and it sucks.

On the plus side, snaps also crap your system log full of petty little AppArmor events. And when snap gets its permissions wrong, you can easily fix it with SnapSeal.

(If Flatpak would just fucking stop rewriting every file path as /var/run/1000/blah, it would be the unquestionably superior package tech)

Friction between Snap and AppArmor is to be expected. The corporate sponsor of Snap, Canonical, is well known for their icy relationship with the corporate sponsor of AppArmor, Canonical.
If you don't want flatpaks to do that, you'll have to give them permission to see the entire file system
As another commentor pointed out, you can just use flatseal to give the app full access to whatever dirs you need.

That's why I moved to fedora recently...didn't like to see 30 or so mounted filesystems every time I did an fdisk -l to mount some disk

Luckily Debian is upstream of Ubuntu.
Fedora is actually my main on my other machines. This is my server though. I've tried fedora server in the past, but it wasnt quite working for what I needed it for at the time. And now, I don't have time to rebuild =\
- Why would you server fedora when RHEL exists? Still, debian is prolly a better choice.
- Sure..I wouldnt choose fedora for a server..maybe RHEL..I chose debian for my home server..can't go wrong with debian in the server 😅
@fernandu00 @terminhell I mean a simple grep to filter them out could have sufficed and then that could be aliased but yeah makes sense. Also zsys and their half assed ZFS integration made no sense.
- You're right.. But I don't have an ssd in my machine and didn't want tons of mounted filesystems in my 10 year old machine..I'm far from an expert but seems to me that is simpler to have all my packages from dnf or apt ..I've changed to fedora because dnf seemed better than apt resolving dependencies ..not just because of the snap thing

Don't use it - vote with your feet :)

Sigh, I was a sysadmin on my own system from 1999-2008 and on a busy server from 2008-2012... then essentially quit. Now with flatpak and snaps it seems I have no idea what I am doing.

Flatpaks aren't very relevant for servers if I am not wrong but Canonical definitely tties to push Snaps for that usecase, I feel like other container technologies like Docker or Podman are a lot more relevant in that context and containerization in general is really nice especially for server use and not that hard to wrap your head around! ;)
- Yeah, that's really what I haven't used that seems significant these days - Docker. I used to use VMs a fair bit including the premade ones from MS for IE testing, which I think (?) are the same concept.
- Docker requires management and some setup. A server snap just works, it's updated automatically and rolls back when necessary.
  
  It's just a breeze. I use it for nextcloud and I'm safe for years with no maintenance from my side at all.

Switching to Gentoo has been the best. If I don't want something I just blacklist it in my make.conf. getting errors from an odd package? Blacklist. Don't want systemd or gnome software? Blacklist. It's great. My shit runs insanely fast and my system only breaks when I explicitly do something stupid, and it's usually just one minor adjustment away from getting fixed.

I don't like snaps, but dude... Do you even know what fstab is?

IIRC, it is a C runtime function that stabs a file.
- It is actually the secure version that requires you to specify a buffer length of the old insecure ftab function that is in half a dozen standards that counted the lines indented by tabs in a file. Of course they didn't change the fact that it just writes the result number as a string into an output buffer instead of returning an integer because that would make it less portable to operating systems which still use the insecure standard version.
Ya, I think I goofed on my terminology XD
- It's ok, bro.

That would be the same of hating docker because it creates networks. It's just how it's sandbox works.

Yeah, there are reasons to criticize snaps but the fact that it takes a lot of space in some UI is not really one of them.

I love snaps. AMA. (but actually don't, I don't want to talk to you)

Oh my god I hate this, I had no idea

There are plenty of reasons to dislike Snap, but tbh "it exposes the UI and UX weaknesses of other apps" isn't really a good one

Why what's wrong with that? Is it just that it looks bad or is there a performance issue to.

Whats this web server

cockpit
- giggity

I've never used a distro that offered/forced snaps so I'm not very familiar with this perpetual topic. Given it's Linux and you have options why would you continue using a distribution who had a main feature you didn't like?

Edit: Debian is server king. Proxmox, trueNAS, Clonezilla, Ubuntu you can go on and on of very niche tailored and rather amazing products that base on Debian. I'm ever curious if there are people out there using Gentoo, Arch or xyz in the server space.

I am forced to do it by my employer