The topic is not whether snaps are avoidable or not, but the Ubuntu is going downhill. And snaps are purported to be part of that downhill, which would be Ubuntu's NIH syndrome. As far as I know, Ubuntu's only successful development is Ubuntu itself - the other projects have all failed over the years, and snap, while ongoing, is not winning any popularity contests either.
But in practice even for flatpak the only realistic place you can publish your flatpak if you want any traction at all would be flathub, so both formats have only one store right now. But flatpak allows a custom store while for some strange reason Canonical decided not to allow snap that freedom.
Also, rugpulling users and migrating things to snaps without asking their users in order to "create a positive pressure on snap team to keep their quality high" didn't sit well with the users.
> But in practice even for flatpak the only realistic place you can publish your flatpak if you want any traction at all would be flathub
But, for any size of fleet from homelab to an enterprise client farm, I can host my local flathub and install my personal special-purpose flatpaks without paying anyone and thinking whether my packages will be there next morning.
Freedom matters, esp. it that's the norm in that ecosystem.
I was neutral-ish about Ubuntu, but I flat out avoid them now, and migrate any remaining Ubuntu server to Debian in shortest way possible.
I'm using Debian for the last 20 years or so, BTW.
Red Hat do the same. They reinvented the wheel on multiple occasions (systemd and it's whole ecosystem like systemd-resolved and timed and the whole kitchen sink; podman, buildah, dnf, etc etc.)
They just have more success on getting their NIH babies accepted as the standard by everyone else. Canonical just fail at that (often for good reasons, Unity was downright crap for some time) and abandon stuff, which doesn't help their future causes.
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530
> like systemd-resolved and timed
They're not forced on anybody, they're not required by systemd, and many distributions use more feature-rich alternatives (including, afaik, RHEL — last time I looked at it, they used dnsmasq and chrony). They're also often shipped as separate optional packages:
$ apt search 'systemd-timesyncd|systemd-resolved'
systemd-resolved/testing,now 257.7-1 amd64
systemd-timesyncd/testing 257.7-1 amd64
Still not anywhere near as popular as Docker. Although technically they're far better than Docker, and if anyone is using them, it's for that reason.
> dnf
Only used by RHEL and its upstream Fedora?
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All of this makes very little sense.
> Still not anywhere near as popular as Docker. Although technically they're far better than Docker, and if anyone is using them, it's for that reason.
NIH packages are generally expected to be less popular, yes. They have some technical merit, though in my opinion that's mostly trade-offs rather than one being strictly better than the other. I would be surprised if everybody using them is using them because of technical merit as opposed to it being pushed by the distro.
Special mention goes to NetworkManager, which has become the de facto standard way to configure networking because it's good. And with nmcli I can even remember how to connect to wifi from single user mode.
This depends on the phrasing. We could also say that Red Hat produces actually useful software, in contrast with Canonical, whose developments don't seem to provide value over existing solutions.
We could also say that Canonical tries really hard to do exactly what Red Hat does, but in a slightly different space, and not very successfully.
Using apt to install some packages installs snap plumbing and downloads the package as a snap automatically. You don't have to install it manually.
There's no malicious intent though, it's made to "impose a positive pressure on the snap team to produce better work and keep their quality high" (paraphrased, but this was the official answer).
This has got to be the most user-blind self-imposed preference in a modern operating system outside of Microsoft's BS.
If you're going to use an OSS operating system, the control of what is placed on the system should be inherently with the user. If the developer has a question if a new package should be added or is required, throw a prompt and ask -- with a default to not use application containers and the default packaging system.
Really not hard.
Debian has been a safe haven since.
Packaged as: https://github.com/justinclift/snapd-empty/releases/download...
It's just an empty package that tells the system snap is installed, to stop the broken dependency chains you otherwise get from force uninstalling snap.
It's been working fine on a handful of Ubuntu 24.04 systems I've been handed and can't change the OS of, for about half a year now.
It should be this: https://github.com/justinclift/snapd-empty/
Then you add e.g. the mozilla PPA such that its firefox package gets installed instead.