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0 pointsSahAssar6y ago0 comments

That works with Flatpak/AppImage too though, right? For me Snap has always had that Canonical smell of not-invented-here, just like Mir, Unity and Upstart. All of those were eventually replaced with what a majority of similar linux distros settled on. I'm not saying it was wasted development or that nothing was learned but ultimately they joined the rest of the ecosystem instead of the ecosystem joining them.

It seems that canonical does best when they embrace the ecosystem and not try to replace it.

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3 comments · 2 top-level

berkut6y ago· 1 in thread

Just like with Upstart (which existed well before systemd did), Snap existed before Flatpak, and in fact existed in another form (Click) for two years before that.

So it's wrong to say Canonical is guilty of NIH-syndrome with these two items, when their versions were out first.

Whether the tech is any good is another matter.

the_why_of_y6y ago

You might as well say FlatPak existed in another form since 2007, considering https://people.gnome.org/~alexl/glick/

https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2018/06/20/flatpak-a-history/

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snappy_(package_manager), Snap was publicly revealed on 9 December 2014, whereas the design of xdg-app (FlatPak's old name) was already discussed publicly at GUADEC 2013.

https://www.superlectures.com/guadec2013/sandboxed-applicati...

jraph6y ago

Upstart actually preceded systemd and was adopted by Fedora, Red Hat, openSUSE and ChromeOS. ChromeOS still seems to use it, interestingly. It probably paved the way to systemd and probably fulfilled a need that no other init system could. Ubuntu was also fast to switch to systemd when it appeared.

Canonical cannot be accused of NIH for Upstart, it was a widely adopted clean init system at the time and made many distro's boot times great again. Service configuration files were also very easy and clean.

Unity was a desktop environment that both was liked by many people and reused many components from Gnome, I don't really see a problem here.

A point could be made for Mir.

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