Yeah, Flatpak is far better. The most glaring issue: Canonical hosts the only Snap backend, you can’t host it yourself. Flatpak on the other hand is fully open.
Don’t introduce proprietary crap just so companies can profit off of it.
Honestly, why enable this kind of behavior in any way? Any user is free to make an informed choice by installing it themselves.
We all know how this goes. Once a critical mass is reached, enshittification begins to milk everything dry. By making it an installer option, you’re legitimizing it and supporting a worse future for the Linux desktop.
Ok but KDE has official Snap packages so they already are “legitimizing it”. Also snap won’t be able to entshittify anything. Snapd is still open source, so you can just repackage the software for different package system.
This is a stupid argument. In FSF’s eyes even having nonfree repository (ie. for drivers) is bad so this is completely irrelevant for anyone considering flatpak or snap. Both have nonfree stuff in there.
But flatpak’s backend is open source and self-hostable, while snap’s is proprietary and not self-hostable. Flatpak is the lesser of evils from this point of view.
Snap? Can we not?
If it’s only there like in KDE Neon, I’m fine with it. I don’t want any of my distro apps to come as Snaps though.
Why? What’s the issue with Snap? Is Flatpak any better?
Yeah, Flatpak is far better. The most glaring issue: Canonical hosts the only Snap backend, you can’t host it yourself. Flatpak on the other hand is fully open.
Don’t introduce proprietary crap just so companies can profit off of it.
I agree but I think it’s the user who should be able to make the informed choice (ie. during installation)
Honestly, why enable this kind of behavior in any way? Any user is free to make an informed choice by installing it themselves.
We all know how this goes. Once a critical mass is reached, enshittification begins to milk everything dry. By making it an installer option, you’re legitimizing it and supporting a worse future for the Linux desktop.
Ok but KDE has official Snap packages so they already are “legitimizing it”. Also snap won’t be able to entshittify anything. Snapd is still open source, so you can just repackage the software for different package system.
No, optionally free is not enough.
This is a stupid argument. In FSF’s eyes even having nonfree repository (ie. for drivers) is bad so this is completely irrelevant for anyone considering flatpak or snap. Both have nonfree stuff in there.
But flatpak’s backend is open source and self-hostable, while snap’s is proprietary and not self-hostable. Flatpak is the lesser of evils from this point of view.