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A comment on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa). Parent comment

Re:Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) by twic on Thursday April 23, 2020 @05:36AM (#22954241)
The way i see it, software which is truly part of the distribution can and should still be packaged the traditional way. But snap/flatpak creates a standard way to install software which is not really part of the distribution. It replaces all the random tarballs and unpacking things in /opt that you occasionally had to do when installing third-party software. It makes sense for VS Code, IntelliJ, Slack, Chrome, etc, to be in snap/flatpak.

It doesn't make sense for open-source software built with traditional tools by the distribution maintainers themselves to be in snap/flatpak.

I note that on Ubuntu 18, snapd itself is distributed as a snap, which seems like a very poor idea to me.

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Re:Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) by mceachen on Friday April 24, 2020 @01:09PM (#22970434)
> snapd itself is distributed as a snap, which seems like a very poor idea to me

I took this as a "vote of confidence" that snap could self-host snapd.

Hosting via snap means they can push updates and not have to wait for users to `apt update; apt upgrade`, as snaps auto-upgrade without user intervention.

I don't know of other benefits, though.

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