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I don’t have a problem with snaps as a technology. If you want to use them, then who am I to judge?
But what I do have a problem with is when I don’t have a choice and I am being forced to use what the distro maintainers think is good for me. That is what finally made me quit Ubuntu and switch to Fedora.
Also, Snap is proprietary. That alone is reason enough for me to steer clear.
Well snap itself isn’t proprietary, the backend server distributing the snaps is.
Explain how this distinction matters in the real world?
Snap distribution is as much a part of snaps as Snapd.
Who cares that part of it is open source if other parts aren’t?
This is why I switched from Ubuntu to Debian.
Ubuntu was great, until Unity debacle, when I switched to Mint DE. Few years later I returned to an Unity free Ubuntu just to be welcomed with snaps and Ubuntu pro.
Canonical have made the same mistake three times as far as desktop environments are concerned, IMO:
- 2004: went with GNOME
- 2010: made Unity as a way to rid themselves of the hostility of the GNOME devs
- 2017: Instead of leaving GNOME in the dust, they went back.
IMO using GNOME is an abusive relationship.
Wait… I’m just about to switch over to Linux on a laptop and was going to use Ubuntu. This looks kind of cursed though?
I recommend LMDE nowadays, but it doesn’t really matter.
Switching to Ubuntu is way, way better than staying on Windows.
That being said, Ubuntu is maintained by the Canonical company, and they have made some really sus decisions in the past. Things like putting Amazon ads in the application launcher and then trying to gaslight people when the inevitable backlash arrived.
The meme above refers to Canonical’s own Snap packaging format (think of it like UWP/Microsoft Store apps vs. “regular” Win32 apps), and the way they’re pushing for its adoption. Snap is installed by default on Ubuntu and official Ubuntu flavors. You can uninstall it manually, but Canonical has modified the APT package manager so that when an application is available as a Snap package, it automatically installs the Snap back-end and the application as a Snap package without notifying the user (instead of installing the
.deb-packaged applications, which is what happens on all other distributions that use APT). Canonical recently also ordered that official Ubuntu flavors (which are maintained by independent groups) can’t include Flatpak, a universal packaging format that directly competes with Snap, in their default installations.You could try out Linux Mint¹, they’re Ubuntu based and disable Snap by default².
Linux mint has no GNOME or KDE variant, so while they fix many Ubuntu issues, they are still on XOrg.
So? There’s nothing preventing someone from installing either, and they’re adding Wayland support to Cinnamon.
True one can install it on Mint. But at that level, just
- install Kubuntu
- add timeshift
- run unsnap (removes snap, installs flatpak and flathub, installs apps as flatpaks)
- add the new official deb repo for Firefox
- remove a possibly installed Firefox Flatpak (has missing sandboxing) and install with apt
While this is not that hard to do if you’re used to linux, I would not reccommend this to someone who is switching from windows.
Just install something else like Linux Mint or Pop OS. Ubuntu doesn’t seem to want to respect your rights as a user. You do one thing and the sneakily do something else. Its a bit like how Microsoft makes Edge the default after an update.
I would suggest not judging distros by what the online community says.
Install Ubuntu and see whether you encounter any issues. If not, who cares about what some meme says.
Nah, this is just the same “hivemind hates thing” leaking over from Reddit. It’s not that different to the systemd hate. There’s a core of a point, but if a small fraction of the energy spent on the daily Two Minutes Hate were redirected towards fixing the things those folks don’t like, they wouldn’t have any molehills to treat as mountains.
Ignore the noise and go with Ubuntu LTS. When you get comfortable with that, you could try Debian.
You could play it backwards too. Try Debian, if you can’t get it to do what you want, wipe and do Ubuntu LTS. But I do not recommend this path if you have no idea what you’re doing. People underestimate how difficult it is to do simple things when you don’t know how to, no matter how trivial.
