The issues are twofold: Linux distros historically update software through a package manager. Something that was working fine for everyone, however it was causing a lot of work for maintainers. They got together and designed a packaging format for software that works across all Linux distributions called ‘flatpak’. However, Ubuntu decided to create an alternative called Snap, which solves the same problem, except it’s not used by anyone else.
Also, there’s some implementation details that make it look messy in your system (every application is mounted as it’s own filesystem, so if you use tools to list your disk’s there’s a bunch of weird spammy looking drives and things like that).
Specific to Ubuntu, not very open for collaboration, and operated by the company who owns the Ubuntu trademarks. Additionally they’ve made it unnecessarily difficult to install non-snap versions of many popular packages. (they removed non-snap versions from upstream Debian repositories).
Didn’t it also used to be noticeably slower than apt installed apps? This was one of the reasons I got rid of it at the time, Ive heard it has better performance now but not tried it.
The issues are twofold: Linux distros historically update software through a package manager. Something that was working fine for everyone, however it was causing a lot of work for maintainers. They got together and designed a packaging format for software that works across all Linux distributions called ‘flatpak’. However, Ubuntu decided to create an alternative called Snap, which solves the same problem, except it’s not used by anyone else.
Also, there’s some implementation details that make it look messy in your system (every application is mounted as it’s own filesystem, so if you use tools to list your disk’s there’s a bunch of weird spammy looking drives and things like that).
Awesome! Thank you for this explanation. So it’s mostly just because it’s a redundancy and specific to a certain distro (Ubuntu in this case)?
Specific to Ubuntu, not very open for collaboration, and operated by the company who owns the Ubuntu trademarks. Additionally they’ve made it unnecessarily difficult to install non-snap versions of many popular packages. (they removed non-snap versions from upstream Debian repositories).
No, redundancy is fine. It’s the proprietary backend and Ubuntu forcing it on users that people don’t like.
Didn’t it also used to be noticeably slower than apt installed apps? This was one of the reasons I got rid of it at the time, Ive heard it has better performance now but not tried it.
I think that’s mostly solved, but yeah, some of the sandbox stuff affected performance.