Man I’m so glad I love my job.

Art isn’t open source, right?

Yeah, Arch isn’t exactly an easy install for beginners.

This is why we should be ranching echidnas.

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to reveal to the world that your butt is an outie

Can confirm. I once ate in my lab and accidentally ate a capacitor I absent-mindedly thought was a piece of broccoli.

Lol imagine a canonical employee using nixos

My favourite Euphorbia

Uhh this is a bottle stopper

And they’re providing Ubuntu for free. If you were a paying customer and the contract you’d signed with them said they’d provide Firefox as a deb, that would be a different situation.

I agree, but unfortunately our opinions don’t move a gazillion finance bros

over the course of a few updates, they replaced half of your programs with snaps (without telling you),

You don’t need to lie. A full list of debs that have been transitioned to snaps is:

• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• Chromium

as you can see on other comments I’m not alone with that stance.

Being in the majority doesn’t necessarily make one right, as shown by [insert election result you disagree with here]. But if you actually are serious about that, you do realise how entitled it sounds to demand that someone do free work for you in the particular way you want it done?

And I believe you mean prerogative.

Because the separate installation means you can actually end up with both an apt installed and a snap installed.

This is something that can happen any time you have multiple package managers or even multiple repositories in the same package manager. Google’s official Chrome apt repo has debs for google-chrome-stable, google-chrome-beta and google-chrome-unstable, quite intentionally.

My comment about docker was a specific example of such a case, where vulnerabilities were introduced. It was actually a commonly used attack a few years ago to burn up other CPU and GPU to generate crypto

Can you provide a link to a source about that? I can’t find anything about it.

and you ended up with both a snap and apt installed docker

If you installed both the docker.io package from apt and the docker snap, yes you wound up with both. Just as if you install both google-chrome-stable and chromium you’ll end up with two packages of (almost) the same browser.

The fact that they are both packaged by Canonical is both irrelevant and a perfect example of the problem.

Then I’m gonna ask that you elaborate what specific problem you’re trying to explain here, because these seem pretty contradictory.

Yes, you are literally forcing me to accept your dollarinos, which, unless I exchange them MYSELF, are USELESS!

Hold on, have I fallen for Poe’s law?

In both cases, the packages are owned by the same people? (Fun fact: mozilla actually owns both the Firefox snap and the firefox package in the Ubuntu repos.) I’m non sure how that “potentially introduces vulnerabilities” any more than “having a package which has dependencies” does.

I’m not sure what you’re referring to with Docker. Canonical provides both the docker.io package in apt and the docker snap. Personally I use the snap on my machine because I need to be able to easily switch versions for my development work.

If you don’t want to explain, you’re perfectly welcome to not explain. But saying what amounts to “if you don’t know I’m not telling you”, especially when you weren’t specifically asked, is a pretty unkind addition to the conversation.

If I were giving you €50/month, and then one day I decided to give you USD$55 instead, am I “forcing” you to accept US currency? No, I’m choosing to give you something I don’t have to give you in the first place in a different form. You can always reject my offer. You can ask someone else to give you €50/month.

They’re choosing how they want to provide Firefox. If anyone else wants to provide Firefox differently, Canonical isn’t stopping them. In fact, Canonical literally hosts and does the builds for an unofficial Firefox repo with their free Launchpad service.

Distributions decide what they want to package and how to package it all the time. Pretty much every time, someone is upset. But that upset is generally based on an unreasonable sense of entitlement.

I don’t believe Flatpak has the ability to package something like node. It certainly can’t package kernels or system services (at least not without leaving the user with a ton of manual work to do that would make it not much better than getting a tarball).

sure, and convince people to switch. it’s been done before of course but it’s a big effort

I agree! But this, IMO, is a better argument for how flathub.org being (theoretically) open source doesn’t actually make it any better than snapcraft.io. The technical hurdle, either of writing another snap store or of setting up a flatpak host, pales in comparison to the social hurdle of getting people to switch. Which is likely why the previous open snap store implementation died. Nobody wanted to host their own and convince people to switch, because at the end of the day there wasn’t any benefit.

that does not mean that the particular developer agrees with or even approves of the snap thing.

Never said it did, although in the particular case of the developer I mentioned, he’s also an Ubuntu Core developer, which depends entirely on snaps. I can’t imagine he’d have put himself in that position if he were particularly anti-snap

steam was a big one that a friend had trouble with, and they just installed that though apt i’m pretty sure.

Ubuntu has never had a steam package in their apt repos, and the steam-installer package still behaves the same way as ever. Personally, I do use the Steam snap and haven’t had any issues with it, though I do know that others have.