A new ‘app store’ is expected to ship as part of Ubuntu 23.10 when it’s released in October — and it’ll debut with a notable change to DEB support.
A new ‘app store’ is expected to ship as part of Ubuntu 23.10 when it’s released in October — and it’ll debut with a notable change to DEB support.
Snap is very similar just not portable to most other distros. It makes a lot of sense both for users and for vendor lock-in.
Snap is portable to other distros, look at the official website and you see a list of distros, you can use snap on. That doesn’t mean that there is no vendor lock-in, just a different kind. Snap as a format grew out of Cannonicals effort in the mobile field. Snaps where supposed to be the truly convergent successor to click, the packaging format used by Ubuntu Touch. And this history is baked into its DNA. It’s right there on the snapcraft website: “The app store for Linux”. As such Cannonical has always courted proprietary software and/or software by big companies (VS Code was first released as a snap for a reason). I think that they have always have had an eye on one day adding app payments and the sweet, sweet 30% cut they can take from every sale
The sandbox requires apparmor, so doesn’t work on anything else by default except OpenSUSE I think.
Solus and Manjaro are shipping Snap installed by default and I’ve never had a problem installing snapd on fedora. All I ever had to do for that was run a single standard dnf install. Apparmor doesn’t pose the problem you think it does
Running software unsandboxed is breaking most of the value of snap. Not only is it insecure many of the portability promises are actually broken and it can load incorrect libraries, etc.
Fedora deleted snap from its repos years ago then it returned. It is a broken mess.
Canonicals response has been: We don’t care, fix it yourself.
It is an awful non-portable solution when a real portable solution exists.