I don’t think snaps are bad (and when someone tries to explain why they are, about 85% of the time they say something wrong enough that I suspect they’re probably just parroting someone else rather than actually knowing what’s going on). It’s sad, because if we could get rid of the bullshit we could actually have decent discussions about the benefits and shortcomings of snaps (and how to fix those shortcomings).

On the .deb front: it’s a package format made by Debian. Each archive contains a data tarball, which has the files in the package in their full structure from /, and a control tarball, which contains metadata such as name, version and dependencies as well as pre-install, pre-remove, post-install and post-remove scripts, which are used doing any setup or removal work that can’t be done just by extracting or deleting the files.

The upside of deb files is that they tend to be pretty small. The downside is that this typically comes from having a tight coupling to library versions on the system, which means upgrading a library can break seemingly unrelated things. (This is why you get warnings like this page: https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian) Many third party distributors (e.g. Google with Chrome) take care of this by packaging most dependencies inside the deb, inflating the size.

Another major difference between packages like debs and rpms and newer formats like snaps and flatpaks is that the latter have confinement systems to prevent apps from having full access to your system.

I pretty consistently find the snaps to be the best trade-off of being up-to-date and stable for me. Especially for CLI tools and services.

Flatpaks and snaps both have shared dependencies, just at a less granular level than debs. OCI images and VMs are pretty much the extreme opposite of shared dependencies.

Some further context on this that @Dop@lemmy.world might want to know:

While Canonical’s snap store is proprietary (which, to be clear, I don’t really like), all the client software is open source and the API is well documented (though a bit janky). Their snap store relay app (which is open source) has a full implementation of it. There was a fully functional open snap store for a while, but the project died out of a lack of interest. You can also distribute snaps through another mechanism and install them locally on the machine (though you then lose the benefit of snapd’s auto updates). You can even do this with snapd still checking the signatures of the snaps.

The standard for snaps is fully open, as is snapd itself.

There’s no need to oversell the negatives to the point of being wrong.

The first two snaps I compared sizes of on my system are uv and bitwarden. The uv snap is 9.5 megs vs. the wheel’s 12.2 megs, and the bitwarden snap is 97 megs vs. the Deb’s 79 megs and the AppImage’s 114 megs. These seem pretty reasonable - doubly so since snaps also have delta updates.

Wait are you actually saying Vegemite is better than Marmite?

What a weird take.

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.

Whose home? Apparmor applies things at a system level, not at a user level.

Gotta give people their Two Minutes Hate or they might remember that voting for Democrats is, for most Americans, the actual least evil option on November 5.

It’s amazing how close they get to making good points before veering off into “Dems bad, do <thing that gets Republicans more power>.”

This meme really doesn’t fit the format. Given the standard form of the meme, you’re implying that Israel are the reasonable, relatable ones here, that the warrants are unreasonable, and that someone other than the ICC has actually announced warrants.

Please don’t.

Nix is a cool, good technology. We don’t need it to be an annoying meme.

Nah, this is just the same “hivemind hates thing” leaking over from Reddit. It’s not that different to the systemd hate. There’s a core of a point, but if a small fraction of the energy spent on the daily Two Minutes Hate were redirected towards fixing the things those folks don’t like, they wouldn’t have any molehills to treat as mountains.

You can’t use environment variables to set up apparmor rules.

https://github.com/canonical/snapd/blob/master/COPYING

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).

Enunciate.

Because I didn’t think it particularly important for countering this same old tired BS. But if you really want to know, it’s Ann Arbor, MI and the mayor was Albert Wheeler.

(Edit and fun fact: I’m writing this from Wheeler Park right now ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ)

Can confirm that it can do this fairly well.

Source: the time I grabbed a machine we were about to toss and made it a secondary domain controller for our site so we could nuke and pave our misbehaving Server 2012 DC.

(That other one was also a secondary DC - we just needed one on-site so we could prevent our T1 connection to another site from being the bottleneck.)

If macos is Wario, surely iOS is waluigi?