So Canonical has the resources to make an entire DE, an init system, a mobile OS, a new display server (all of which were dumped on the roadside), and then going all in on a brand new sandboxing/package management system developed from scratch, but merely compiling a web browser officially supported by google and used by nearly every single one of their users is too much work?
a) One Snap package that supports all Ubuntu distros from 14.04 to newest, and also many other distros than Ubuntu
b) Compiling separate .deb package for all those Ubuntu versions from 14.04 to newest.
Chromium has huge amount of code that takes a lot of time to compile.
If I understood the issue correctly (and I may very well be mistaken!) the problem Mint has with Canonical is that Ubuntu has "hijacked" (for lack of a better term) some apt packages so that they now actually install snapd and the snap. So you think you're opting out of snap, but when you use apt to install Chromium you end up using snap anyway.
If I understand correctly, this is Mint's main complaint: that Ubuntu seems to be hijacking apt packages with snap.
https://ubuntu.com/blog/chromium-in-ubuntu-deb-to-snap-trans...
Canonical couldn't afford the maintenance costs for it. On Ubuntu distributions it's either the snap or you have to create some weird frankendeb aspect by pulling from Debian.
They explained it better than I would.
In other cases, I don't think of a case where apt installs snaps over apt. I think the only priority for the decision choice was based on most recent version. Although this aspect I am slightly unclear.
https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/chromium-browser
In previous versions of ubuntu, that package would install chromium, as one would expect.
In recent versions of ubuntu, this package is a stub that installs snapd, and then snapd installs chromium.
There is a substantial difference between those two things. Users that try to install chromium through an open package management system are being pushed to Canonical's proprietary store.
> The problem was the decision to change the Ubuntu chromium-browser APT package itself upstream in Ubuntu. Previously, that package would simply install Chromium directly. With the change, it would instead install the Snap package-management tools first and then install the Snap equivalent of the Chromium package — without making it clear to the user what was happening.
I just use the Chrome apt repository from Google which seems simpler all around.
Like Linux Mint is doing the same? There is no control being lost by using Ubuntu versus Mint. I could remove snapd there without people making that decision for me.
Worse would be Mint's decision of removing the only FOSS built version of chromium without offering an alternative in place. Canonical only installed the chromium snap because they did not have the resources to support a deb version instead.
>Imagine strawman-ing this hard.
It isn't a strawman. It is precisely what their reasoning was and it makes perfect sense. The snap store has already seen people attempt to install cryptominers. There is no way in Flatpak of banning known malicious flathub repos.