Also, moving control from the user to the developer. Snaps automatically update, and until recently had no way to disable this behavior. This is a poor security choice, and means that a stable system cannot be made.
While apt can still be used, many packages were replaced by snaps, completely defeating the purpose.
Most notably the Calculator app. An app which started in less than a second on Ubuntu 16.04 and which now starts in about 4 seconds on Ubuntu 18.04. All so the developer can include copies of the system library dependencies that already exist in the main filesystem. An app that is notable for providing the user with the most powerful capability of performing arithmetic operations on a modern computer.
Snaps have done what countless desktop environments could never do. Make it faster to do math using Google than by using a local calculator application.
> (N.B. Various snaps for ripgrep on Ubuntu are also available, but none of them seem to work right and generate a number of very strange bug reports that I don't know how to fix and don't have the time to fix. Therefore, it is no longer a recommended installation option.)
I distinctly recall getting suggested by 'command-not-found' to install rg from a snap in some version of ubuntu, but I don't remember what version it was.
Just an hypothesis, maybe some Rust apps that can't be compiled with the toolchain in Debian/ubuntu have no pother choice then use snap/flatpack (so maybe at that time in an LTS ditro apt would not have worked)
This isn't it. They just package a version of ripgrep that does compile with their toolchain. ripgrep has been around for almost four years now, and I think the first release was around Rust 1.9 or so. So even Debian will have a new enough version to compile some version of ripgrep.
I used to include installation instructions for Ubuntu Snap, but they were so mis-managed (both from the perspective the maintainer of the snap and of the entire snap ecosystem itself) that they were causing giant headaches. It became such a problem that I specifically put a call-out to it in my bug report template: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/.github/IS...
Snap has been hugely annoying on multiple axis since day 1.
So you claim the package was in Debian and Canonical removed it to replace it with a snap? AFAIK if you want to push your stuff into Ubuntu you are always strongly encouraged by Ubuntu to put your stuff in Debian,
>While apt can still be used, many packages were replaced by snaps, completely defeating the purpose.
From my understanding there are not many snaps installed by default, and the ones installed by default are Canonical ones not some Solitaire game you found on a piracy website.
The issue with deb is you need to install the package as root. For example I needed a program to inspect a PDF, I found "PDF Master" and it had a .deb installed , but should I trust this program installer? Because I understand how deb works I downloaded the file, unpacked it and run the application without installing it, we need something that allows us Linux users to run random binaries without giving them root and would be cool if we had easy to use sandboxing and firewalls to prevent this apps connecting to who know what.
While apt can still be used, many packages were replaced by snaps, completely defeating the purpose.