I don’t have a problem with snaps as a technology. If you want to use them, then who am I to judge?
But what I do have a problem with is when I don’t have a choice and I am being forced to use what the distro maintainers think is good for me. That is what finally made me quit Ubuntu and switch to Fedora.
Also, Snap is proprietary. That alone is reason enough for me to steer clear.
Well snap itself isn’t proprietary, the backend server distributing the snaps is.
Explain how this distinction matters in the real world?
Snap distribution is as much a part of snaps as Snapd.
Who cares that part of it is open source if other parts aren’t?
I do have a problem with them, the same problem was solved, better, with other technologies like appImage (which doesn’t litter your mount list with 100 meaningless entries).
Even flatpak is better, snap is an also ran they’re trying to force on us without being as good as any of the competitors.
Couldn’t the same argument be made for any distro? They give you what they put in their repos. If you want a deb package, use the mozillateam PPA (which is built on Canonical’s hardware, same as Mozilla’s snap of it).
the difference is that the folder/package structure for other package manager is open and well known
everyone can host their own i.e. apt, pacman or Flatpak repository with little effort
the required folder/package structure for snaps is no longer open and you cannot change the default snap repository either easily
The package structure for snaps is very much open, as is the API for a snap store. There was for a long time an open source snap store implementation, but it died out due to lack of interest by others in actually hosting their own stores, which to me says a lot about whether people actually want to host their own repo or just want to use it as a way to complain.
IIRC, the issue was that - unless you take steps to explicitly prevent it - Ubuntu would occasionally reinstall the snap version. I don’t remember the details, been a while since I had to dance that dance, but I recall it being one of the things that put me off snap in particular, Ubuntu in general and sparked my search for a different distro.
I’m now on Nobara, a Fedora-based gaming-oriented distro maintained by GloriousEgroll (who also maintains the popular Proton-GE)
Like with any time you’re trying to select a specific source for a package, you need to set apt configuration to prefer that source. It’s standard apt behaviour with a standard way to configure it.
when I don’t have a choice and I am being forced to use what the distro maintainers think is good for me.
That’s the case on literally any distro.
And just like on literally any distro, you can also install Firefox from FlatPak, the Mozilla repo or from source.
Except on Ubuntu it just installs the snap regardless. If you don’t pay attention you may not even realize that it is a snap. Also the snap store is controlled exclusively by one company with a questionable history.
