Canonical is planning an ‘All Snap’ desktop next year. It will likely be available side-by-side with the traditional deb-based installation we’ve been used to since 2004.
If the “All Snap” or “immutable” platform is to be a success, Canonical needs to get a grip on the broken, uninstallable, insecure, and outdated snaps provided in the snap store.
As I mentioned, there’s around five thousand snaps in the store. Hundreds of them haven’t been touched in years. Some developers have just abandoned their packages.
I want to see this situation improve. In general, Canonical should incentivise the promotion of applications and dis-incentivise letting applications languish.
Flathub solves this with flatpak-external-data-checker, a tool that automatically makes a PR (and therefore test builds) every time upstream releases a new version.
That said, generally speaking snaps are more up-to-date than .deb packages, and Canonical’s security team is a large contributor for the .deb patches anyways - it won’t be hard for them to also patch relevant snaps.
If Ubuntu wants to go all-in on snaps, I expect them to do the same amount of vetting, testing, and maintenance that they do in the official Ubuntu repos.
But I think the real point here is to save themselves that work. The current Snap store is a mess, with multiple versions of the same apps by different packagers/maintainers. If upstream protects adopted snaps and provided official distro-agnostic packages, then that’d be cool, but that’s not what I’m seeing today, by and large.
My general experience with Snaps has been poor. I don’t know if Snaps are there future, but I know for damn sure that they’re not the present and I’m not motivated to go any further into the Snap ecosystem until they clean up this mess
Also it needs to be mentioned that snap store don’t force any styling guidelines where it comes to description of packages. Most apps have names that are not styled properly, have low quality icons etc. This is a deal breaker for me
Are snaps still slow as heck and use up memory per install for no reason?
I haven’t had that issue since upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04lts a few months back