apt install firefox

ok, what is snap and why should I care?

One of my friends spent like a month distrohopping just to find a debian-based distro that fits these two criteria:

• First-class support for KDE

• Isn't broken all the time

Ubuntu fails both. KDE Neon excels on the first one, but fails harder than ubuntu on the second one. Kubuntu as well. Debian has horridly outdated packages, and he refuses to use nix/flatpak. Tuxedo OS is obscure and broken. Mint is great, but installing KDE takes some effort.

He finally settled on Ubuntu Server with the native KDE package. Still has to do some weird incantations to banish snap tho.

How did things get this bad?

I don't have a problem with snaps as a technology. If you want to use them, then who am I to judge?

But what I do have a problem with is when I don't have a choice and I am being forced to use what the distro maintainers think is good for me. That is what finally made me quit Ubuntu and switch to Fedora.

This is why I switched from Ubuntu to Debian.

8.10 was the last good Ubuntu. (It also had the best default wallpaper ever)

If you look at the "improvements" in every release since, you'll notice that shit like they do currently isn't an accident:

9.04 integrated web services into the main user interface.
9.10 integrated Ubuntu One (Ubuntu's OneDrive, upgradable for money) by default and introduced the slooooow Ubuntu Software Center
10.04 integrated an interface to post on social media
10.10 added app purchases in the Software Center
11.04 made Unity the default
11.10 removed Gnome as fallback to Unity
12.04 introduced the buggy HUD
12.10 added the famous Amazon ad lense to it by default

and it goes on like this...

This is literally the reason why I switched over to Debian. At least back then, snaps wouldn't work if the home folders were not under /home/<username>, breaking all computers on the system I helped run.

Installed ubuntu on an rpi and firefox there ran snap. Was not very usable. Everything was so slow. Forcing an install of the dep package was the only way to use it. Not very well thought through bu cannonical.

sudo apt-mark hold snapd

Wait... I'm just about to switch over to Linux on a laptop and was going to use Ubuntu. This looks kind of cursed though?

The nextcloud snap is the best and easiest way to selfhost nextcloud.

I said it. Fight me.

Installs Thunderbird snap and the dialog crashes, on 12 identical upgrades

Snap could have been great. Except it wasn't very good...........

This is why I use Windows.

I feel like I would be more okay with this is snap didn't still have a lot of very real flaws.

IMO the biggest issue with snaps in the sandboxing. Makes so many apps unusable for development.

I am against container as they are slower to start and much bigger. I think they solve the problem the wrong way. Next step is probably a VM...

Firefox have always been possible to run without container so what is the problem for all Linux distributions that containers solve? Nowadays developers have do to both... That did not less the load.

smirks with nix packages

I use nix btw

not sure which is worse these days.