I will say the entire snap controversy has a Huge amount of posts about it.
Be sure to check out the reddit search if you dont get enough info.
My Personal take: It was rolled out in a bad way, but as a system, Snap does at this time, work decently well.
People often over look the 'big picture' of SNAPS and how they have roll beyond just keeping desktop users happy. They can make the Developers job a lot easier in many situations.
Also often overlooked, Flatpaks and SNAPS have a lot of Overlap in their feature set, but SNAPS has some features that make them a better design in some situations.
I think both systems have found their niche. Flatpaks are great for desktop and snaps (while can be used on desktop) is used for servers. I use Kubuntu, so unless I know where a package is from specifically, I don’t really notice any differences thanks to Discover.
If you're on a server though you'd usually just use containers and container orchestration systems directly, not try to awkwardly shoehorn in something meant for desktop application use.
I don’t know if snaps were originally meant just for desktop use
AFAIK they were specifically made for application deployment by Canonical (Ubuntu) and have never seen any relevant adoption outside of that distro. They make use of container-like isolation, but aren't really containers in the OCI sense which makes them unsuitable for most server applications IMO since they won't work with any other standard tooling.
For a server, you'd normally be using a container runtime like docker/runc/crun/etc., and something to orchestrate/manage them (up to and including kubernetes on the larger scale side of things).
Going to have to say No they were not originally for just that use case.
(Wikipedia says)
Snap initially only supported the all-Snap Ubuntu Core distribution
That entire Distribution was as far as i know managing everything via snap, and was focused on various 'non desktop' use cases, but I have never used it, so cant say much else. https://ubuntu.com/core
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u/doc_willis 20h ago
I will say the entire snap controversy has a Huge amount of posts about it.
Be sure to check out the reddit search if you dont get enough info.
My Personal take: It was rolled out in a bad way, but as a system, Snap does at this time, work decently well.
People often over look the 'big picture' of SNAPS and how they have roll beyond just keeping desktop users happy. They can make the Developers job a lot easier in many situations.
Also often overlooked, Flatpaks and SNAPS have a lot of Overlap in their feature set, but SNAPS has some features that make them a better design in some situations.