this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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I appreciate that they try, and as much as I dislike some of snap's design choices I think it has a place. Flatpak appears to be the winner in this race however, and I feel like this is Unity all over. Just as the project gets good they abandon it for the prevailing winds. I've been told the snap server isn't open source, which is a big concern?
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Unlike desktop environments where there were equivalent alternatives to Unity, Flatpak isn't an alternative to Snap that can deliver an equivalent solution. You can't build an OS on top of Flatpak. This is why I think that if Snap makes the lives of Canonical developers easier, they'll keep maintaining it. We'll know if Ubuntu Core Desktop becomes a mainstream flavor or the default one. I think there is a commercial value of it in the enterprise world where tight control of the OS and upgrade robustness are needed. In this kind of a future Snap will have a long and productive life. If it ends up being used only for desktop apps which Flatpak covers, it may fall by the wayside as you suggested.
Absolutely, and I think that's why snap has a future at all. Immutability is the future, as well as self-contained apps. We saw the explosive growth of Docker as indication that this was the way. If they can make their tooling as easy as a Dockerfile they will win just by reducing the work needed to support it.