Ubuntu 23.10's New Software App Will Demote DEBs (Apparently) - OMG! Ubuntu
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A new 'app store' is expected to ship as part of Ubuntu 23.10 when it's released in October — and it'll debut with a notable change to DEB support. Don't

A new ‘app store’ is expected to ship as part of Ubuntu 23.10 when it’s released in October — and it’ll debut with a notable change to DEB support.

  • Recant@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      There’s a benefit to Canonical, the corp that maintains Ubuntu, which is that while snaps are open source tech, the server for the snap store is closed source and snap can’t be configured to point at another store.

      In other words, it’s about centralized control.

      There are some advantages to the tech itself, like live auto-updating, which is good for security-critical server apps, but over all I’m not a fan.

      • Recant@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        I don’t think that the board members are sitting there and pondering how they can exercise more control on the user via snaps.

        The auto updating is a nice benefit but it doesn’t seem like a big enough benefit to allocate so many developer man hours into. I would think that Canonical would realize that the developers time is better spent making features the users want.

        But what do I know? I’m just someone posting on Lemmy not a Canonical board member haha

    • CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml
      1·
      1 year ago

      Canonical is just weird like that, it seems. They tend to pick something and fixate on it really hard (Eg. Unity desktop, Mir, that convergent phone thing, now Snaps) and work on it until it’s almost really good, then they get fixated on the next shiny thing and dump whatever they were doing to go chase that instead.

    • Auzy@beehaw.org
      0·
      1 year ago

      It could be like the old RPM vs DEB arguments. Technically, one could have argued at the time that RPM was explicitly singled out in the Linux Standard base.

      However, these days, DEB certainly feels more common (although, from my understanding, Redhat/Slack is big in enterprise, so i’m not actually sure which is more common).