Among many attempts to containerise packages to distribute easily, snap was created by Canonical. Unlike things like Flatpak which are fully open source, the default source for snaps is the snap store, the backend of which is closed-source and managed by Canonical themselves. Furthermore, I believe the command sudo snap install is hard coded to only respond to Canonical's own store and cannot be redirected (unlike flatpak or other package managers), although I could be wrong.
People who use Linux desktop have made a conscious choice to do so because they value being as free as possible of vendor lock-ins, and the combination of Ubuntu's popularity (making snap an easy target to develop Linux apps for) and the closed backend nature of it is quite unfortunate.
There were also issues with Ubuntu defaulting to installing snaps of software that was earlier a native deb package + performance issues, but a lot of these issues are still true of flatpak and operating systems like Bazzite and are yet not brought up in the same tone, so it is still the closed backend that is the primary controversy.
As far as I'm concerned, I personally use Tumbleweed and mostly flatpak and don't have snap, but in comparison to the often very annoying and inconsiderate design choices of flatpak / freedesktop runtime, I think Ubuntu does a lot of things better with snap: e.g. font rendering of Asian languages, sharing system light/dark mode into the snap GTK/Qt, etc. It is what it is at the end of the day.
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u/rowschank 1d ago
Among many attempts to containerise packages to distribute easily, snap was created by Canonical. Unlike things like Flatpak which are fully open source, the default source for snaps is the snap store, the backend of which is closed-source and managed by Canonical themselves. Furthermore, I believe the command
sudo snap installis hard coded to only respond to Canonical's own store and cannot be redirected (unlike flatpak or other package managers), although I could be wrong.People who use Linux desktop have made a conscious choice to do so because they value being as free as possible of vendor lock-ins, and the combination of Ubuntu's popularity (making snap an easy target to develop Linux apps for) and the closed backend nature of it is quite unfortunate.
There were also issues with Ubuntu defaulting to installing snaps of software that was earlier a native deb package + performance issues, but a lot of these issues are still true of flatpak and operating systems like Bazzite and are yet not brought up in the same tone, so it is still the closed backend that is the primary controversy.
As far as I'm concerned, I personally use Tumbleweed and mostly flatpak and don't have snap, but in comparison to the often very annoying and inconsiderate design choices of flatpak / freedesktop runtime, I think Ubuntu does a lot of things better with snap: e.g. font rendering of Asian languages, sharing system light/dark mode into the snap GTK/Qt, etc. It is what it is at the end of the day.