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I love snaps, but I'm getting a bit worried now that I'm seeing more and more Flatpak only apps not in the snap store. Snaps were way ahead at first, now it's becoming a real fragmentation issue.


Snaps were never ahead; it was a quick-and-dirty solution thrown together, during the time when flatpak was being designed. It was lets-do-quick-something, so we can claim first prize, never mind the consequences.

It is just another case of Cannonical being Cannonical, now with the flavor lets-try-to-monetize-here (you cannot have your private snap repos, like you can have with apt, dnf or flatpak. You can use only single global one run by Cannonical, and to get a private part of it, it is pay for play).

So yes, it is becoming fragmentation issue and thing will get much worse (for Ubuntu users), until Cannonical reverses.


It's really annoying, Canonical pretty much has no true competitors aside from Red Hat, and they seem to have only recently started becoming a mainstream desktop choice.

But than Canonical reinvents wheels, which is like, the one thing you should almost never do, if you're trying to be the one size fits all choice for those of us who hate heavily customized systems.

Whatever Red Hat does seems to always win in the end, and it's generally great once it's established, but Debian is the standard on a lot of of things, and it's nice to have everything in one family, so everything works the same on the server as on your dev machine.

All the distros besides Red Hat stuff and Ubuntu seem to be either unpopular, or trying to stick to a Unixy kind of experience to some degree, or they have their own uncommon incompatible stuff added on, like Mint with Cinnamon that's not quite as nice as GNOME now that GNOME has kind of got their crap together again.

Maybe just vanilla Debian with Gnome will be the way to go now that Flatpak seems to be winning...




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