Ubuntu 23.10’s New Software App Will Demote DEBs (Apparently)

Tldr: the new store only supports snaps, deb support will come later. OP, please provide summary next time if you link to clickbait articles.

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.

I never found out what's wrong with APT.

Time to change distro.

Classic canonical move: Take community software, force snaps into it and then ship it.

Ubuntu is getting on my last nerve. At this point I'm going Debian on everything except Thinkpad, but only because it's Nvidia based and Pop!_OS just works on it.

Maybe I need to reconsider Pop OS. Last time I tried they shipped with a broken kernel, but that's probably fixed now.

The Fedora software app has been promoting flatpaks over native packages, even not displaying that native packages are available even if they are, requiring the command line tool to access some native packages. So I don't see how this is fundamentally different.

Yeah, nah, that's a dealbreaker for me. I'm back to LMDE when this happens.

I don't mind having snaps available but I'd avoid using them whenever possible. They're larger than necessary, slower than necessary, and I trust software checked by its original devs plus distro maintainers more than software checked by the devs alone.

Permanently Deleted

Honestly not sure why it matters, provided the store is full. Both are similar to end users

Looks like Ubuntu will be going the way of Reddit

I've been using more and more flatpaks lately on arch and fedora based distros, i have no idea how snaps compare but seems similar? Seems an odd push from Ubuntu, but could make more sense than deb packages for non techy users perhaps?

Why do Linux nerds that care about this sort of stuff hate snaps so much?

Is it the concept of snaps / flatpaks that is the issue or snaps specifically because Canonical is behind them?

I know literally nothing about how they work except I installed the VLC snap and it's fine.

I couldn't install Parsec (a remote desktop game streaming app) because of a missing dependency (an old version of lib-something codec that wasn't in my newer version of Ubuntu). I spent like an hour trying to figure out how to take the 18.04 version and add it to 22.10. I don't know Linux at all so I wasn't making much progress. Someone, not the developers of Parsec, made a flatpak and it magically worked.

I was afraid that because the flatpak was made by some random guy I couldn't really trust it. I looked inside the flatpak and it's seems to be nothing except for the Parsec deb coming straight from the official Parsec URL and that libcodec thing that was causing a problem.

So from my perspective, not knowing the technical details or politics, what's the problem?

This is why im on the hunt for a new distro. Looking at pop and fedora right now. Kinda prefer deb cause thats been my env for 15 yrs

Ubuntu and Snaps are the cancer of the Linux world. :)

That's why I left for MX Linux.

Dunno why Canonical is pushing snaps so hard over flatpak