The Desktop team has just returned from our engineering sprint in Gothenburg, and as we begin the development cycle for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, I’m excited to share what’s coming next for Ubuntu Desktop. Long-term support releases traditionally focus on stability, refinement, and a cohesive user experience across installation, daily use, security, and enterprise integration. Here is a look at the key themes and what we aim to deliver when 26.04 ships next April. Desktop Experience Gnome 50 and ne...
Yeah snap killed Ubuntu for me. I used pop for years, flirted with fedora, but, vanilla Debian is just so good and reliable, that’s where I’ve landed.
Back when I used it for a couple years, maybe twenty years ago, it always felt a little broken in many ways. That was long before the whole snap mess. Anyway I never really thought of it as a quality product.
Agreed! Though give me the backports any day.
Snap is interesting for me it can do more things than flatpak and has some really interesting sandboxing features coming up such as permission prompts for filesystem access.
But Canonical management is a significant hindrance. The Snap Store simply cannot be trusted after so much malware got in and they still have not improved their processes. So many snaps including Canonical’s own, are still using core22 for some reason. And there’s the broken snaps Canonical pushed on users.
I would love to see a snap repo that takes the best parts of Flathub and Fedora Flatpaks. Because as a technology, I think snap beats flatpak (if you’re using AppArmor). But it’s Canonical’s poor management that really drags it down.
On the other hand:
aptCLI instead of the originally supported packages 🤬 (what the hell, Canonical!? Are you doing the same crap as Microsoft?).The server-side closed garden is the opposite of an open ecosystem and the open-source community. You can add custom repositories to APT or Flatpak. Every new snap interaction feels like another step toward forcing the user to use it, instead of offering cool features that convince users on their own merits.
The last change (installing snapped apps when you run
apt install) was horrendous. What’s next? Installing snapped apps when the user runsflatpak install?The only logical reason for them forcing users into their own, proprietary snap store, when a user is trying to install from another source, is they want complete control over that ecosystem. And the only reason for that is so that they can eventually sell it to a huge player like Microsoft or Google or Amazon.
They are completely untrusted with that slimy move.
Exactly, the way Snap is managed is very much out of a big tech playbook, and it won’t be surprising if they’re acquired by big tech. The whole point of Linux for most of us is avoiding big tech bullshit.
All of those, apart from loop devices, are not technical limitations, but results from Canonical’s poor management and monopolistic desires.
Huh. I don’t know enough about Flatpak, I guess repo owners get to make that call? Do Flatpaks have a preinst equivalent? Could you theoretically have an empty Flatpak that installs snaps at a system level? I guess it would need explicit permission to write to the filesystem, which kinda seems to be the opposite of the purpose of Flatpak.
And like, even if that is possible, the Flathub maintainers would probably reject it on principle. So I’m imagining CanHub with an extra step in the installation instructions that gets you to pipe a curl’d script into sh, at which point, what’s the point?
Flatpak recently got a method of preinstalling flatpaks.
A flatpak cannot install a snap on your system. Apt can install a snap because when apt installs and updates packages, it can also run scripts as root. That’s insecure and potentially dangerous, so flatpak doesn’t have that ability.