In a surprise move, Ubuntu developers have agreed to stop shipping Flatpak, preinstalled Flatpak apps, and any plugins needed to install Flatpak apps through a GUI software tool in the default package set across all eight of Ubuntu’s official flavors, as of the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 release.

  • 2xsaiko
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    159 months ago

    I have said and will keep saying this, Snap continues to be one of the worst things Canonical has tried to pass off as “production ready” at least in recent times, and every time they push more for it makes me consider them even more of an untrustworthy distro vendor.

    My personal experience with it is that I had to nuke it off the computers I maintain last time we updated Ubuntu to the new release (unfortunately I don’t control what OS we’re using, otherwise Ubuntu would have been gone faster than you could say “Snap”), because these computers have user homes on a network drive, which isn’t under /home, and snap just flat out refuses to work when that is the case.

    It wouldn’t even be such a problem if they hadn’t removed Firefox among other things from their repositories, but as it is right now, there’s no way to run Firefox on Ubuntu without mucking around with PPAs if your user home is not under /home. This bug about that has been open for 7 years!

    That said, I think this is fine considering Flatpak is still going to be available in the repositories, just not installed by default. I’m much more a fan of “install what you need”, anyway. (But then again, that’s not the style of distro Ubuntu wants to go for.)

    • @kamin@lemmy.kghorvath.com
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      29 months ago

      I’m okay technically with Snap, and I appreciate that it can do CLI programs as well which Flatpak can’t (to my knowledge. My issue with it is that Canonical has dug their feet in on making their store the default and only package source for everyone. It’s clear to me that they want to be the gatekeepers of software on Linux.

      • 2xsaiko
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        49 months ago

        Yeah, it definitely does CLI applications better, I think Oracle uses it for some of their system monitoring services on Oracle Cloud for example. At least the snap issue I linked is also still open unlike the issue for better CLI handling for Flatpak which was closed without being fixed and makes the guy who closed it look like an arrogant asshole.

        To be honest I don’t really like either of these because they both have big flaws like that, and of the three major “standalone app formats” I prefer AppImage the most simply because I can just download those without needing to install some other daemon first.

    • @winnie@lemmy.mlOP
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      181 year ago

      No, it’s not nice decision. It’s more political decision, to force Ubuntu’s own solution instead of alternative.

      (I’m wondering if you would be notified for reply in mastodon?)

          • anders
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            49 months ago

            @winnie
            It shouldn’t matter. Mastodon users should get notified when you reply to their post even though they aren’t tagged in it.

            At least that’s the case for me on Friendica but I remember the same behaviour from back when I used Mastodon.

    • PureTryOut
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      59 months ago

      Wait, how did you view this post via Mastodon? I know both Lemmy and Mastodon use ActivityPub but the UX and urlpatterns are quite different and client-specific. What is the format of the link you used to view this?

        • PureTryOut
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          19 months ago

          I found out in the meantime. You can find communities from Lemmy on Mastodon using the @communityname@server pattern. So @kde@lemmy.kde.social will find this community. On Mastodon it’ll appear as a user boosting every post (both top post and comments) and that way you can find individual comments.

          It isn’t great, the UX is clearly different and not made for each other, but it works and you can favourite or boost individual posts with it.

  • @wiki_me@lemmy.ml
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    91 year ago

    Flavor leads (apparently) agree

    Press X to doubt

    Ubuntu asking its flavors to stop using something because it doesn’t is a head scratcher. Flavors regularly use things Ubuntu doesn’t, things you could argue are more intrinsic to an “Ubuntu experience”, like installers, login managers, icon themes etc. Why single out Flatpak?

    IMO Canonical wants to make snap like google play, where people sell stuff and they take a 20-30 percent commission

    • @AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.mlM
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      1 year ago

      The most popular non-Canonical derivatives, Linux Mint and POP OS, have both totally rejected and vocally criticize Canonical’s bullshit, Snap or otherwise. This isn’t going to make the fall in line, this is going to make them finally get serious about ditching Ununtu and switching directly to the upstream Debian base.

      • eroc1990
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        19 months ago

        Yup. S76 drew a pretty clear line in the sand when they went all in on Flatpak. I’m glad some derivatives have the backbone to not back Canonical’s decision making.

  • Ephera
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    71 year ago

    by making it clearer about what an “Ubuntu experience” is.

    The user experience will be worse, because they can’t use Flatpaks without jumping through extra hoops.

    So, I guess, a “Ubuntu experience” is a bad experience. Not going to argue with that.

    • @AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.mlM
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      1 year ago

      Ubuntu is the stepping stone from Mac/Windows to Linux. Like the tutorial level. It’s also one of the most “corporate” Linux OS vendors outside of RedHat. Of course it’s shitty lol.

      • Helix 🧬
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        11 year ago

        Of course it’s shitty lol.

        It shouldn’t be, though.

  • @torturedllama@lemmy.nz
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    69 months ago

    This is bizarre. Snap has improved a tiny bit over time, but it continues to not be that great. Meanwhile, flatpak is miles ahead. Things are generally just smoother and less annoying, even when Snap is working as intended.

    Personal anecdote: I was having no end of trouble with Inkscape, it was just not working, very unreliable, all sorts of very odd issues. It got worse and worse over time to the point where it didn’t even seem to understand paths to open files anymore, if it even felt like opening that day. I tried reinstalling, clearing the config, all sorts of things. I suspected maybe the version of Inkscape Snap was giving me might have a bug in it so I was looking around for alternative ways to install an older version and then for some reason I tried Flatpak. It was like some kind of magic. Totally night and day. All of a sudden Inkscape had absolutely none of the issues that the Snap version had. It just worked. After that I realized that it hadn’t been a bug in that version of Inkscape at all, it was just Snap.

    I haven’t had any issues with any other Snaps, but that incident really opened my eyes to just how bad things can get if a program isn’t packaged correctly.

    • Transient Punk
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      49 months ago

      It’s because Canonical has a vested interest in pushing the solution that they spent money developing.

      Ass much as I appreciate everything that Canonical has done for Linux, this is the problem with trusting for profit companies in the open source realm. Profit is their motivator. They don’t care that flatpak has better performance than snap, they just know they spent money developing snap, so they have to force it onto their users, despite it being the inferior tech.

    • @AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.mlM
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      91 year ago

      And Snap isn’t? If you think Flatpak is bad how exactly is locking you into an objectively worse universal package manager the solution?

          • Helix 🧬
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            111 months ago

            It needs a daemon (lots of wasted resources).

            You have to fiddle around in config files to allow access to files on the system instead of using something like Flatseal.

            It basically only works with a store which is kind of proprietary.

            Own repositories are hard to set up.

            The packaging for software maintainers is harder than Flatpak’s.

      • @winnie@lemmy.mlOP
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        1 year ago

        @federico3@lemmy.ml, @ParanoidFactoid@beehaw.org

        You misunderstand problem, that Flatpak is solving. Yeah, it’s not ideal way to distribute OSS software, if it already exists in distro’s repositories. But many distros has small repository with outdated software. But FP is great to run proprietary software, as it is able to confine it into sandbox. And untrusted code won’t be able to access your home dir!

        Some benefits can be for OSS software too, as some security bugs can be unintentionally introduced, or perhaps someone would intentionally introduce malicious code to codebase, and it would bypass code review. But mostly for Browsers, which might have remote code execution bugs.

        • @federico3@lemmy.ml
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          11 year ago

          No, you are confusing flatpak with sandboxing. Sandboxing is a good thing. You don’t need flatpak to implement sandboxing. Additionally, good sandboxing has to be configured by trusted 3rd parties, like package maintainers, not by upstream developers, because the latter creates a conflict of interest.

          • @winnie@lemmy.mlOP
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            21 year ago

            I understand that sand-boxing can be achieved by other means, and flatpak is using kernel facilities. But this is actually way to make it mainstream, and ease applications packaging. Similar thing to what happens on mobile platforms, like Android and UWP(bruh). So this is actually progress to better and safer desktop. Not perfect yet.

            Most flatpaks don’t require access to root or home fs, so host files are shielded. Only way to access fs is using file access dialogs and Drag’n’Drop(which is broken currntly)

            good sandboxing has to be configured by trusted 3rd parties, like package maintainers, not by upstream developers, because the latter creates a conflict of interest.

            Unfortunately this is true. But you can check defined permissions before installing app. And user would be notified it application after update requires more permissions.

            But I guess flathub maintainers won’t check/review packages, so not ideal.

          • Helix 🧬
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            21 year ago

            What solution would you use instead of Flatpak for sandboxing and reducing the workload of maintainers providing packages to many distributions at the same time?

            I’d rather have a maintainer spend time on actually maintaining software instead of packaging it. They can package as AppImage, tarball and Flatpak and I’m happy. You don’t have to use Flatpak, you know? Linux is about choice. I have never used any software which was available exclusively as Flatpak.

            • @federico3@lemmy.ml
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              11 year ago

              You are confusing package maintainers with upstream developers. They are not the same people, and this is by design in most distros, so that maintainers provide a second pairs of eyes, provide security fixes and sometimes remove trackers and similar “features”.

              • Helix 🧬
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                11 months ago

                No, I know what a software maintainer is. In many cases, the developers writing the software also provide builds or at least build scripts. So they’re also packaging it.

                You’re obviously correct that the people maintaining packages in distributions don’t have to be, and often are not, the same people who maintain the packaging scripts in upstream repositories.