Damn, that was a depressing read. If that's how things are going, then it really is past time for me to stop using Linux entirely. This is feeling like the final straw in a series of things that have been pushing me away.
Oh, I have quite a few of them, from increased resource usage, proprietary aspects, through forced updating and more. The forced updating is particularly unacceptable.
But, the 10,000 ft view is that they reduce the amount of control I have over my system. They offer restrictions I chafe at while giving me no benefit that I care about.
I'm not going to sit here and say they shouldn't exist. That they're not to my taste doesn't mean that others who like them shouldn't have them. But they're not to my taste at all.
After seeing systemd getting widely adopted (also not to my taste), if snaps (or flatpacks, although I am less allergic to those) join the party then that's just a clear indication that the Linux world and I have diverged too much and I need to move on.
Alpine feels a lot like a BSD to me, and I’m very happy with it.
But this bloatification is happening all over the place. Firefox is starting to have more and more dependency on flatpak’s daemons, even if you don’t use flatpak. These daemons are becoming the de facto standard for some interfaces too sadly. This also means that a lot of software is a lot less portable.
I'm saddened to hear that FF has dependencies on flatpack daemons, but I'm not surprised by it. The direction Linux is going seems very clear to me, and I expect more of that sort of thing as time goes on.
Meh. There’s just too much technical debt all over the place. Not even BSDs suffice from the POV of what an OS can be. A new modern OS written today with lessons taken from the past would solve the inherent pains of all existing ones. My dream is to do that. Just a dream rn tho.
It's a quite powerful idea to run every package in its own container (sandbox).
However, it depends on the implementation and Snap just sucks.
(Note that the default Unix assumption is that no users can be trusted but all applications can be trusted, which is wrong imho. Containers provide a way out of this, but things get messy very fast.).
I haven't run a desktop linux for years so this might be completely off, but what I got from it was there will two majors paths:
- you're a hardcore oriented distro, you assume most things will be built from source, follow all of your dependencies and maintain the glue for your distro. Gentoo/Slackware style。
- you value convenience and go the snaps/flatpack route.
And you can still go the convenience path while building some specific apps from source, but there will be a bigger gap to bridge and it won't make sense formost applications.
I get the shift, as we're already seeing it, even outside the cloud, I think it's still the best of both worlds. I compare that to how I'm running a natively compiled postgres version but a containerized mysql because it was too much of a pain to match all the dependencies.
Personally mine are the fact that this isn't really "zero trust", but more "infinitely diffuse trust" where every user has to trust every application. None of the packaging alternatives I'm aware of seem to yet have their security story in line where they are either secure enough (without breaking most software) to not have to trust every application or provide some level of assurance themselves comparable to the debian maintainers.
Snap makes it easier to distribute closed-source software like skype - but people running linux on the desktop generally have no great love of closed source software.
For open source software, snap is the same software, but slower, more broken and with worse upgrades.
Snap's changed the firefox update process so I now have to run 'sudo snap refresh' and wait for a download, where before I just closed and reopened it. Maybe it'll make my running application's dock icon disappear, hope you always use alt+tab instead of the dock. Snap can install ffmpeg - but I can't feed a screen recording to vaapi for compression because whoever set up the sandboxing forgot to allow that. Good luck sharing anything from, say, ~/.config/ on, say, discord - you get a silent unexplained failure, because hidden folder access is blocked by the sandbox. Installing a browser? With snap you get three copies; you can adjust refresh.retain down to only keep 2 copies - but 1 copy is out of the question.
There's a reason canonical has to force snap down people's throats, and it's because nobody uses it by choice.
This model destroys any reason for software to be open source. What's the point of having source code if you just run the binary provided by some party?
Reminds me of the early days of the tensorflow where everyone used whatever binary package worked an no one could run anyone else's code because people kept getting stale binaries somewhere in the stack.
What's the snap equivalent of "apt-get source"? Failing to find that meant for me, it was time to start purging snapd from new installs entirely (and to start fretting about ubuntu starting to be philosophically incompatible with what I want out of a system.) Fortunately even with 23.04 (server) that still seems to leave an entirely working system.
That's not an answer to my question. For example, I see no evidence Debian is moving toward app images as the standard way to distribute software. Same goes with Arch and I'm sure many others.
And btw SteamOS is absolutely not a sandboxed environment. It just has a read-only OS filesystem so they can safely blow it away upon upgrade.
Debian and Arch are exceptions. I believe maintainers of every other mainstream distro are exploring immutable distros or at least shipping confined apps.
