this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
0 points (50.0% liked)
Linux
48185 readers
1940 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why is Ubuntu pushing snaps so hard? Is there objectively a benefit to them apart from Flatpak?
It seems like an odd hill to die on.
Canonical is just weird like that, it seems. They tend to pick something and fixate on it really hard (Eg. Unity desktop, Mir, that convergent phone thing, now Snaps) and work on it until it's almost really good, then they get fixated on the next shiny thing and dump whatever they were doing to go chase that instead.
They're the Google of Linux.
There's a benefit to Canonical, the corp that maintains Ubuntu, which is that while snaps are open source tech, the server for the snap store is closed source and snap can't be configured to point at another store.
In other words, it's about centralized control.
There are some advantages to the tech itself, like live auto-updating, which is good for security-critical server apps, but over all I'm not a fan.
It could be like the old RPM vs DEB arguments. Technically, one could have argued at the time that RPM was explicitly singled out in the Linux Standard base.
However, these days, DEB certainly feels more common (although, from my understanding, Redhat/Slack is big in enterprise, so i'm not actually sure which is more common).
Except both RPM and DEB are fully open-source. Flatpak is open-source, Snap is partly proprietary.