In a surprise move, Ubuntu developers have agreed to stop shipping Flatpak, preinstalled Flatpak apps, and any plugins needed to install Flatpak apps through a GUI software tool in the default package set across all eight of Ubuntu’s official flavors, as of the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 release.
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Omg why?? It just gets worse.
It’s because Canonical has a vested interest in pushing the solution that they spent money developing.
Ass much as I appreciate everything that Canonical has done for Linux, this is the problem with trusting for profit companies in the open source realm. Profit is their motivator. They don’t care that flatpak has better performance than snap, they just know they spent money developing snap, so they have to force it onto their users, despite it being the inferior tech.
This is bizarre. Snap has improved a tiny bit over time, but it continues to not be that great. Meanwhile, flatpak is miles ahead. Things are generally just smoother and less annoying, even when Snap is working as intended.
Personal anecdote: I was having no end of trouble with Inkscape, it was just not working, very unreliable, all sorts of very odd issues. It got worse and worse over time to the point where it didn’t even seem to understand paths to open files anymore, if it even felt like opening that day. I tried reinstalling, clearing the config, all sorts of things. I suspected maybe the version of Inkscape Snap was giving me might have a bug in it so I was looking around for alternative ways to install an older version and then for some reason I tried Flatpak. It was like some kind of magic. Totally night and day. All of a sudden Inkscape had absolutely none of the issues that the Snap version had. It just worked. After that I realized that it hadn’t been a bug in that version of Inkscape at all, it was just Snap.
I haven’t had any issues with any other Snaps, but that incident really opened my eyes to just how bad things can get if a program isn’t packaged correctly.
Flavor leads (apparently) agree
Press X to doubt
Ubuntu asking its flavors to stop using something because it doesn’t is a head scratcher. Flavors regularly use things Ubuntu doesn’t, things you could argue are more intrinsic to an “Ubuntu experience”, like installers, login managers, icon themes etc. Why single out Flatpak?
IMO Canonical wants to make snap like google play, where people sell stuff and they take a 20-30 percent commission
The most popular non-Canonical derivatives, Linux Mint and POP OS, have both totally rejected and vocally criticize Canonical’s bullshit, Snap or otherwise. This isn’t going to make the fall in line, this is going to make them finally get serious about ditching Ununtu and switching directly to the upstream Debian base.
by making it clearer about what an “Ubuntu experience” is.
The user experience will be worse, because they can’t use Flatpaks without jumping through extra hoops.
So, I guess, a “Ubuntu experience” is a bad experience. Not going to argue with that.
Ubuntu is the stepping stone from Mac/Windows to Linux. Like the tutorial level. It’s also one of the most “corporate” Linux OS vendors outside of RedHat. Of course it’s shitty lol.
