Next time, Gort will install Debian and save himself the trouble
Installs Ubuntu.
It is Ubuntu.
Gets angry.Gort is not angry. Gort is calm.
Honestly, instead of trying to remove Snap from Ubuntu, I’d just install another distro (PopOS for example is mostly like Ubuntu but with Flatpak instead of Snap)
Oh, is there a point using PopOS even if I replace the WM?
Pop is great, even without the wm. The app store is top notch, if you’re into that sort of thing. Basically it’s Ubuntu minus snaps, so slightly more modern Debian, with good flatpak integration making up for all apt’s drawbacks. Perfect for the computer you want to be able to use without dealing with out of date packages or rolling release tinkering.
Even so, the wm is worth taking the time to get familiar with, because it’s intuitive enough for a non power user, and you’re not going to approach its efficiency in terms of workflow unless you can consistently use several dozen keyboard shortcuts on a more bare bones tiling wm. Anyway, that’s my opinion, having used a wide variety of window managers since the 90s.
Been using pop for months now. The one thing I have a complaint about my part has to do with Steam. I was drawn to Pop because it had good Nvidia support out the box. Steam flatpak is fine but it can’t do some things that the normal deb version can, such as accessing other drives you may have steam games installed on, or that you want to install them on. You have to make some sacrifices with your library setup and your freedom with it when using flatpak.
It took me a while.to figure this out. I like to share it when I can. The deb version of steam is much nicer to use.
I just started tinkering with Ubuntu a week ago. What’s wrong with snap?
It’s a bad, slow and inefficient solution for a problem that is already solved. And because nobody would use their proprietary shit over flatpack, they force the users to use it. Even for things that exist natively in the repositories and would need neither snap nor flatpack.
Best explanation of snaps and their problems i’ve ever read.
It’s slow, forced by Canonical, and starts a pointless format war with Flatpack.
Flatpack isn’t without its own quirks and flaws. There is no One True Way. Being open-source, there shouldn’t be one.
It is definitely slow though, mostly on first run.
Being open-source
Yeah, that. That’s exactly the problem. To quote @Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever above, who put it much better than I could:
. . . the main issues boil down to concerns over some parts of the Snap ecosystem being closed source, Canonical’s ongoing efforts to try to get some of the Red Hat “premium linux” money, and arguments that other solutions (e.g. flatpaks and appimages) are “just as good, if not better”. And it doesn’t help that Canonical/Ubuntu is increasingly pushing snap as “the only solution” for some applications.
When you speak of no single One True Way and things being completely open source, Canonical/Ubuntu have already left the chat.
This computer idiot would also like to know why snap bad.
For computer idiots it’s not bad at all. It mostly just works if you don’t mess with it and Canonical relies on it to ship software for Ubuntu. It’s one of those you should know what you’re doing situations if you’re using standard Ubuntu and messing with it. If you remove it, you will have to figure out what’s shipped via snap and how to supplant it if you want it working, among other potential headaches.
Those are all valid points, but there’s one more. As a person who is just coming back to Linux after 25-30 years and relearning it all from scratch, I just don’t want the hassle.
Sure, there’s overlap between distros, Linux is Linux, and any knowledge I might glean from Ubuntu would also largely apply to any other distro – but why should I bother with investing time into a product that is already heading toward future politics and regressive policies when I can just install [NotUbuntu] and swerve the entire mess?
There are hundreds of distros from which to choose these days, literally. Why start with one that’s already obviously moving toward the dark side? For all that I could just stay on Windows. I’m trying to get away from triple-E and paywalls and gatekeeping, not just find different ones.
Right now I’m testing out over a dozen distros on an old laptop in my spare time, and I think the only Ubuntu related one in my list is Pop!_OS, and it’s there only because Pop!_OS doesn’t rely on snap.
It’s one of those you should know what you’re doing situations
And I absolutely DO NOT, so that’s that, lol. These days every brain cell counts, so damned if I’ll waste any time wading into that mess.
