Snap out of it: Canonical on Flatpak friction, Core Desktop, and the future of Ubuntu
Canonical on Core Desktop and the future of Ubuntu
Ubuntu Summit The Register FOSS desk sat down with Canonical's vice-president for engineering, Jon Seager, during Ubuntu Summit earlier this month. This is a heavily condensed version of our conversation.
Canonical, leading the charge towards enshittification of Linux. Who would've guessed this 20 years ago?
how long is the Amazon sponsoring ago? Was that 20 years?
Yeah, Canonical has been sketchy for a long time. And every now and then they make a move that just reminds me why I stay away from Ubuntu.
Around then. I tried Ubuntu in 2011 maybe, and it opened to this Amazon app being stuck on desktop or something, and so I went back to Windows immediately.
Wasn't till W10 enshitification that I tried Linux again.
Red hat has also done some weird things in the past. Guess the Linux community is against corporations.
This is a pretty frustrating interview to me. He doesn't really seem to engage at all with the fact that building a core system component in a way that isn't fully open completely looses all of the resiliency to enshittification or conflict of interest between corporation and users that makes linux a good thing in the first place.
I don't personally really like that fedora chooses to repackage and serve their own versions of flatpaks. But that its possible is mandatory, because otherwise if flatpaks are successful and they end up making choices that are user hostile, there is no escape hatch.
Its a completely unnecessary choice, and is to me, entirely disqualifying. If snaps were to become successful it would be a bad thing for this ecosystem that I care about.
I also find it frankly bewildering that he talks about everything being their own software stack as a flex, when this whole space is built on collaboration building together, and then goes on to describe it as vertical integration, a form of anticompetitive behavior that countries make laws aimed at preventing. Vertical integration is not a good thing.
Its fine if your stack is all yours, but thinking vertical integration is a flex feels really slimy and out of touch to me
I thought that snaps were open. The only thing Ubuntu didnt open source was the storefront and people can build there own storefront.
Is that wrong?
It is my understanding that the back-end marketplace for snap is not open, and that snap as a packaging ecosystem is permanently tied to Canonical (company behind Ubuntu) exclusively.
No one else can build a snap repository or source (not sure what the best language would be but I'm trying not to word things ambiguously).
From Wikipedia:
Others have objected to the closed-source nature of the Snap Store. Clément Lefèbvre (Linux Mint founder and project leader[75][76]) has written that Snap is biased and has a conflict of interest. The reasons he cited include it being governed by Canonical and locked to their store, and also that Snap works better on Ubuntu than on other distributions.
Which is why people are unhappy with snap. And why I say that although I wish fedora didn't set up their own flatpak repo and provide then alongside flathub, to me its a requirement that it be possible to do that. Because then if the people leading the project start making user hostile choices, you have recourse. Same as with any free license, open source project- you can just take what was already built and the community can rally around moving efforts over to the version that isn't being user hostile.
Snap doesn't have that. If they became successful, canonical would have enormous power over the linux ecosystem and if they chose not to treat users with respect, they would already have market capture. The more successful they were to become, the more likely things depend on them. Like important packages only being published as snaps. And the more likely that things have been built around snaps specifically, the bigger of a liability it is for linux as a whole. A liability controlled by a for-profit company, with for-profit motives.
People have similar frustrations with systemd as more projects build hard dependencies on it, but at least those are still totally open projects
Sorry to the long wall of text but I hope its at least helpful 😅
Edited to add the section from Wikipedia
In reality, every time you add another store, you are essentially giving those people root on your machine.
That's not true. Not even I have root when using flatpak, how should anyone else have root using my flatpak.
I guess he just means that you give them a lot of power but root is not the same
Isn’t base Ubuntu losing marketshare?
I know it’s not comprehensive, but the Steam survey shows Mint skyrocketing and Ubuntu dropping like a rock. And I feel like Snap doesn’t matter in server deployments or business machines. So… who’s this for?
The more important metric to Canonical however is corporate / paying customer marketshare - I am guessing it hasn't suffered too much otherwise they would have backed down on some of their decisions regarding snaps.
Snap absolutely matters in server deployments FYI. Its advantages are pretty clear in that space, and arguably more suited to it.
The only reason I can think of to use a Snap is that you're using Ubuntu, and some package you expected to be available through apt is now only available as a Snap. The better solution is to not use Ubuntu, and rely on Docker or Podman to get anything not available as a system package.
Oh, that's interesting. And from what I know about Flatpak, I can see issues there.
...If snap (and base Ubuntu) basically diverge to, and specialize in, server usage, that seems fine.
They do? Why?
I think there is something to be said for the model with the Apple App Store and the Google Play store: they're being kind of the obvious place that your software comes from, from a vendor who is committed.
This is a terrible example... FDroid is far more "committed" to transparency and security. As the creator of the distro you have full ability to decide which repositories are included.
if you think about just the notion that there is a store full of content that has been somewhat vetted by the distributor of the platform, I think it is difficult to argue that that is a straight bad thing.
It's absolutely "a bad thing" if the distributor of the platform is the only one who gets to decide what software and repositories can be installed.
You can still download a Snap file off the internet and do snap install -- dangerous.
We also don't need platform distributors declaring anything they haven't personally verified as "dangerous"...
This is why I've always said Ubuntu is the only distro I will dissuade users from using.
In reality, every time you add another store, you are essentially giving those people root on your machine.
Shuttleworth made the exact claim like 10 or so years ago about Ubuntu not being a democracy and Canonical being root on all Ubuntu machines.
Is it a line in their internal 10 commandments?
It was an idea he wrote about once for a high school homework assignment, and he got an A on it. (/s for people not familiar with Canonical's weird obsession with employee highschool performance)
Zorin OS is Ubuntu based. I wonder if, like Mint, they prioritize apt and flatpaks over snaps when using apt.
They do
Oh ok that's good!
I don’t in anyway support where Canonical is going with this but I also understand why they’re doing it.
Thank you Canonical for reinforcing my pre-existing opinions about Snaps, and your organization more broadly.
I don’t really like snaps much. Just seemed to download so much and then proceed to use up a lot of CPU.
I can't believe they fumbled their reputation so bad lol
Oh cool. I just leave my distro on whatever default it comes with.
TL;DR: Canonical doubling down on snaps. Further down the line, if you refuse snaps, audio won't work since pipewire is to become a snap. He also uses Apple and Play Services as a "good example".
Been meaning to fully switch to Debian for a while, but I've been making due modifying my apt sources to have the apt version of Firefox from the ppa and pin it above the snap version, but I guess at some point I'll have to bite the bullet and do a reinstall.
Kinda crazy this had been 10 year old Ubuntu installs that I've kept going year after year from OS upgrades to hardware upgrades. My server Ubuntu install has transitioned from a Q6600 Intel core 2 duo, to a i7-4770, and would have survived another hardware upgrade I'm going to plan but that'll probable be when i do my reinstall.
My personal laptop install has gone through 3 different laptops that I've just moved over from 1 drive to the next with gparted, from a dell vostro 3550, to a Dell latitude e7450, to a dell latitude 7490, again looking at an upgrade for the laptop too, I'll probably reinstall with Debian.
If anyone has any new-ish AMD based laptop recommendations that are upgradeable (non-soldered ram, etc) and that don't break the bank, I'd appreciate it! Apparently dell doesn't sell any AMD laptops other than 1 outdated model from before 2020 I think.
I feel like the obvious picks from the linux crowd would be a thinkpad or framework. I'm sure there are other great options though
It doesn't answer your question directly, but https://linuxpreloaded.com/ has a large list of vendors you could check out.
Why not vanilla? It is your next Operating System.
Sigh. I really was hoping they would've learned by now.
Glad I switched to Debian a few years back. Got that hassle out of the way and I see no reason to use Ubuntu.