lengau

Yes, you are literally forcing me to accept your dollarinos, which, unless I exchange them MYSELF, are USELESS!

Hold on, have I fallen for Poe's law?

In both cases, the packages are owned by the same people? (Fun fact: mozilla actually owns both the Firefox snap and the firefox package in the Ubuntu repos.) I'm non sure how that "potentially introduces vulnerabilities" any more than "having a package which has dependencies" does.

I'm not sure what you're referring to with Docker. Canonical provides both the docker.io package in apt and the docker snap. Personally I use the snap on my machine because I need to be able to easily switch versions for my development work.

If you don't want to explain, you're perfectly welcome to not explain. But saying what amounts to "if you don't know I'm not telling you", especially when you weren't specifically asked, is a pretty unkind addition to the conversation.

If I were giving you €50/month, and then one day I decided to give you USD$55 instead, am I "forcing" you to accept US currency? No, I'm choosing to give you something I don't have to give you in the first place in a different form. You can always reject my offer. You can ask someone else to give you €50/month.

They're choosing how they want to provide Firefox. If anyone else wants to provide Firefox differently, Canonical isn't stopping them. In fact, Canonical literally hosts and does the builds for an unofficial Firefox repo with their free Launchpad service.

Distributions decide what they want to package and how to package it all the time. Pretty much every time, someone is upset. But that upset is generally based on an unreasonable sense of entitlement.

I don't believe Flatpak has the ability to package something like node. It certainly can't package kernels or system services (at least not without leaving the user with a ton of manual work to do that would make it not much better than getting a tarball).

sure, and convince people to switch. it’s been done before of course but it’s a big effort

I agree! But this, IMO, is a better argument for how flathub.org being (theoretically) open source doesn't actually make it any better than snapcraft.io. The technical hurdle, either of writing another snap store or of setting up a flatpak host, pales in comparison to the social hurdle of getting people to switch. Which is likely why the previous open snap store implementation died. Nobody wanted to host their own and convince people to switch, because at the end of the day there wasn't any benefit.

that does not mean that the particular developer agrees with or even approves of the snap thing.

Never said it did, although in the particular case of the developer I mentioned, he's also an Ubuntu Core developer, which depends entirely on snaps. I can't imagine he'd have put himself in that position if he were particularly anti-snap

steam was a big one that a friend had trouble with, and they just installed that though apt i’m pretty sure.

Ubuntu has never had a steam package in their apt repos, and the steam-installer package still behaves the same way as ever. Personally, I do use the Steam snap and haven't had any issues with it, though I do know that others have.

Uhm… and why does the user have to transition to snaps?

They don't. But Canonical will no longer be providing debs in primary Ubuntu repositories, so those transitional packages exist so that users don't wind up with an abandoned, old version of Firefox.

Why does Canonical provide those transitional packages while there are perfectly valid debs for the same thing?

For the same reason neither Ubuntu nor Debian provide debs for Google Chrome, despite Google having an official apt repository? Those debs exist in somebody else's apt repository. If you want to add that apt repository, you're welcome to. But those external packages aren't part of the system they provide.

you instantly refute yourself, kudos!

Your unwillingness to accept what I'm saying doesn't make what I'm saying contradictory.

Canonical provides transitional packages for packages that they've decided to provide as snaps. They're not forcing anyone to use snaps, they're saying "if you want the default we provide you, we're providing you with a snap." KDE Neon (my current distro, which is downstream of Ubuntu) has decided that they want to use the deb packages from packages.mozilla.org, so they provide an override. If you want to use the deb from packages.mozilla.org, you could grab KDE Neon's repository deb and install that, or just set up the mozilla repository and use the same pin file they already have.

This is like saying "Debian FORCES you to use libav" Debian moved from ffmpeg to libav for a while. No, they provided libav and made transitional packages for this drop-in replacement. Some people didn't like that and made their own ffmpeg repos, and the process for using their separate ffmpeg rather than Debian's transitional packages was the same as the process for using Firefox from a different repository. (I was one of the people used some third-party ffmpeg repositories, and I was glad when they switched back to ffmpeg and provided libav to ffmpeg transitional packages.)

Does the fact that the Ubuntu repositories don't contain Keysmith mean "Ubuntu PROHIBITS you from using Keysmith?"

Because people who just want their daily Two Minutes' Hate rather than actually having nuanced takes.

While Canonical's particular snap store implementation is closed source, all of the client software as well as the store API are open, and snap isn't even tied to using snaps from their store. One could easily make a client app that treats snapd much the way apt treats dpkg. (In fact given apt-rpm I think it would probably be feasible to quite literally use apt for that.)

KDE seems to upload their packages to the snap store for Neon, judging from their page.

KDE also maintains most of the flathub.org packages for KDE apps. Not sure what the point is here.

canonical are not the ones doing the maintenance for those apt packages. the debian team does that.

This is wrong in two ways. First, Canonical are the primary employers of a lot of Debian developers, including to do Debian maintenance or development. This includes at least one of the primary developers of apt. Canonical also upstreams a lot of their work to Debian. Second, of the three (!) whole packages that Canonical decided to make transitional packages to the snap, none were coming from upstream Debian. Firefox was being packaged by Mozilla (and Mozilla were the ones who decided to move it to the snap), Thunderbird's package had been something Canonical was packaging themselves due to the Debian/Mozilla trademark dispute that they never moved back to syncing from Debian due to technical issues with the port, and Chromium was, at least at the time, remaining frozen at old versions in a way that was unacceptable to Ubuntu users.

These are two incredibly persistent pieces of misinformation...

1. Canonical provides snaps for Ubuntu. This is no more "forcing" you to use snaps than they force you to use debs, or than Fedora forces you to use flatpaks/rpms.
2. Apt doesn't "prefer snaps" by any means. Canonical provides transitional packages for certain packages that got migrated from debs to snaps, but the steps for using another apt repository to replace one of these transitional packages are the same as the steps for replacing any other package provided in your base repos with one from a different repository: You add the other repository, and you tell apt to prefer that repository for the specific packages.

They're not forced to do so. You can install snaps locally (or provide a distribution system that treats snapd much the way apt treats dpkg), or you can point snapd at a different store. The snap store API is open and documented, and for a while there was even a separate snap store project. It seems to have died out because despite people's contention about Canonical's snap store, they didn't actually actually want to run their own snap stores.