[GoLUG] Bottles

[Alex Finkel]

On Sat, 2025-02-22 at 06:28 -0600, o1bigtenor wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 22, 2025 at 3:15 AM Ron <admin at bclug.ca> wrote:
> > 
> > Omer Zak wrote on 2025-02-22 00:54:
> > 
> > > I am curious to know what system problems did you have due to
> > > snaps.
> > > My own experience with snaps was good, overall.
> > 
> > Likewise.
> > 
> > Snaps and flatpacks (and appimages) are all designed to isolate
> > apps
> > from the system, so causing "system problems" would be quite
> > unexpected.
> > 
> You would think but - - - well - - - - my experience.
> (I do use appimages but won't touch flatpacks nor snaps.)
> 
> Its all about system control - - - snaps resulted in my system
> updating when Canonical
> decided it would be updated (this was thankfully not my main working
> system!!).
> This included updates that had flaws so that things had to be rolled
> back - - - not
> something that had been planned for by the snap dev team (at the time
> at least).
> There was recommended a process so that such updating would be held
> in abeyance.
> I set that up and then found that once a month my system would be
> forced to its knees.
> It was literally forced to shut down. That lasted for three months
> whereupon I chose
> to get rid of such malware. It was actually impossible to use the
> normal apt/dpkg
> remove and purge to clean the system. End result after a lot of
> probing was that
> I had to reinstall the system which is most definitely not the *nix
> way of doing things.
> (And yes I did ask a lot of questions on how to get this done and was
> unable to
> implement any of the suggested options by the snap dev team.)
> 
> I believe that Canonical wanted this close tie in to enhance its own
> marketability and
> thereby its 'value'. All about control for profit. So Ubuntu is a now
> a non-issue here.
> Am also quite gun shy of any much virtual system stuff as a result as
> well.
> 
> HTH
> 

In this case, the blame falls squarely on Canonical and their policies.
Technically, there is nothing inherently bad about Snaps or Flatpaks,
but Canonical has chosen to use Snaps as a way to force updates on
users and lock users into there ecosystem.  One big difference between
Snaps and Flatpaks is that the Snap backend infrastructure is
proprietary and controlled by Canonical.  The way Canonical has handled
the implementation and forcing users to use Snaps is a big reason I
avoid Ubuntu.

I recommend this article for more details: 
https://lwn.net/Articles/825005/


I see the benefit of Flatpaks for software developers - if they don't
want to depend on every distribution to package their software
natively, why should they create all those packages themselves when
they can distribute a single Flatpak that runs on everything that
supports flatpaks.

For users there are potential benefits as programs in Flatpaks run in a
sandbox which provides some isolation, adjustable by the user, from the
user's system and from other flatpaks.  They are basically OCI
containers or OSTree bundles.

I have 76 flatpak packages on my system currently and a number of those
are for software I use regularly.  I have not had any issues using them
due to their being flatpaks.

-Alex