Agreed, but it’s also user friendly as apt is the typical interface people use. It seems Ubuntu isn’t necessarily targeting the power user with this change.
I can understand some of the positives of having it be in a snap, but I’d rather have a native package myself. Glad I don’t use Ubuntu on the desktop anymore.
Agreed, but it’s also user friendly as apt is the typical interface people use. It seems Ubuntu isn’t necessarily targeting the power user with this change.
The power user would likely be using the command line tools while the non-power user would likely be using a graphical tool like GNOME Software. From the command line, maybe a different tool should be shipped that pulls from the Ubuntu deb repositories or Snap, based on what is available. Something like software install firefox. GNOME Software already abstracts away from the user where the software is coming from, so installing Firefox might install a .deb or Snap, but so long as it gets installed, that’s all that really matters.
I don’t have an Ubuntu machine at hand to check but something tells me that if I do apt install firefox and it installs the snap, but then I do, say, dpkg -L firefox to list the installed files, or dpkg -S <whatever> to see who installed a file, the result won’t be quite what I expect it to be. If your target audience is “people who are likely to copy-paste commands off the Internet to make their stuff work”, then having apt install firefox install something other than the Firefox deb package is a preeeetty bad idea support-wise.
Snaps are the reason I’ve completely abandoned Ubuntu and never deploy it anywhere anymore. If anything, I’ve gone full Fedora as a result.
Canonical does fine work, and I’ve heard all the arguments for ease of maintenance as regards snap-ing things, which I can both appreciate and also point to flaws with (that others have written on better than I can).
At the end of the day, it’s another in a litany of Ubuntu-only things (upstart, mir for a minute, that network manager (which wasn’t half bad even)) that seemingly are built in a vacuum.
I’ve heard lots of criticism of snap, but is there anyone out there that actually likes it that will step up to speak of its advantages, particularly as opposed to Flatpak? Is there any distro that enthusiastically in on snap packages aside from Ubuntu? To me it seems like this is another case of Canonical stubbornly sticking with their home-grown solution while everyone else has moved on to an alternative (see also: Upstart, Unity, and at least to some extent, LXC.)
I thought the argument for Snaps was that Mozilla, not Canonical, wanted it this way. But the fact that Mozilla is maintaining the debs on Launchpad shows that likely isn’t the reason for the switch to Snaps. Launchpad link: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/ppa
It’s just a team for maintaining Mozilla-related software like Firefox and Thunderbird and addons in Ubuntu, with Canonical employees and community members in it (according to a casual and inaccurate check of email addresses and changelogs). I think the “official” way of getting Firefox from Mozilla is a tarball from mozilla.org.
What’s more concerning is when you do an
apt install firefoxit installs the Snap package instead. This is deceptive and dishonest IMO.Agreed, but it’s also user friendly as apt is the typical interface people use. It seems Ubuntu isn’t necessarily targeting the power user with this change.
I can understand some of the positives of having it be in a snap, but I’d rather have a native package myself. Glad I don’t use Ubuntu on the desktop anymore.
The power user would likely be using the command line tools while the non-power user would likely be using a graphical tool like GNOME Software. From the command line, maybe a different tool should be shipped that pulls from the Ubuntu deb repositories or Snap, based on what is available. Something like
software install firefox. GNOME Software already abstracts away from the user where the software is coming from, so installing Firefox might install a .deb or Snap, but so long as it gets installed, that’s all that really matters.I don’t have an Ubuntu machine at hand to check but something tells me that if I do
apt install firefoxand it installs the snap, but then I do, say,dpkg -L firefoxto list the installed files, ordpkg -S <whatever>to see who installed a file, the result won’t be quite what I expect it to be. If your target audience is “people who are likely to copy-paste commands off the Internet to make their stuff work”, then havingapt install firefoxinstall something other than the Firefox deb package is a preeeetty bad idea support-wise.Is it surprising? This is how chromium has worked on Ubuntu since 19.10.
Snaps are the reason I’ve completely abandoned Ubuntu and never deploy it anywhere anymore. If anything, I’ve gone full Fedora as a result.
Canonical does fine work, and I’ve heard all the arguments for ease of maintenance as regards snap-ing things, which I can both appreciate and also point to flaws with (that others have written on better than I can). At the end of the day, it’s another in a litany of Ubuntu-only things (upstart, mir for a minute, that network manager (which wasn’t half bad even)) that seemingly are built in a vacuum.
I’ve heard lots of criticism of snap, but is there anyone out there that actually likes it that will step up to speak of its advantages, particularly as opposed to Flatpak? Is there any distro that enthusiastically in on snap packages aside from Ubuntu? To me it seems like this is another case of Canonical stubbornly sticking with their home-grown solution while everyone else has moved on to an alternative (see also: Upstart, Unity, and at least to some extent, LXC.)
I thought the argument for Snaps was that Mozilla, not Canonical, wanted it this way. But the fact that Mozilla is maintaining the debs on Launchpad shows that likely isn’t the reason for the switch to Snaps. Launchpad link: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/ppa
A Mozilla team is not a Mozilla team.
It’s just a team for maintaining Mozilla-related software like Firefox and Thunderbird and addons in Ubuntu, with Canonical employees and community members in it (according to a casual and inaccurate check of email addresses and changelogs). I think the “official” way of getting Firefox from Mozilla is a tarball from mozilla.org.
Also, ‘this is a way you can get Firefox’ does not mean ‘this is the way we want you to get Firefox’.