I said “apathy”, not “negative”. The people who dislike snap have likely moved to other distributions, and I don’t see any widespread praise considering Ubuntu’s market share within the Linux ecosystem, so the most likely answer is that people either don’t know or don’t care about snap.
Whether or not an application is packaged as a snap is also a poor indication. Most of the software used in Ubuntu still comes from an APT repo, mostly official or sometimes a PPA. Many developers distribute their software exclusively as flatpaks, appimages, or binaries. Shit, Valve even recommends against using the snap version of Steam. By using your standard, snap would be considered an abject failure.
Snap doesn’t really even have as many applications packaged as people think.
Snap’s package count is often touted as being much higher than Flatpak’s. However, this is misleading, as Snap allows the inclusion of many command-line interface (CLI) only packages that aren’t well-suited for containerization.
The inclusion of these CLI-only packages drastically inflates Snap’s overall package count, while Flatpak does not include as many standalone CLI tools.
Furthermore, packaging CLI tools as Snap or Flatpak packages doesn’t really make much sense. A huge amount of CLI tools were never intended to be used inside a containerized environment like Snap. As a result, there will likely be compatibility issues and unsupported edge cases.
Additionally, there are already established universal packaging standards for CLI tools, such as Nix and Homebrew.
These packaging systems are better suited for distributing standalone CLI applications compared to containerized formats like Snap and Flatpak.
I said “apathy”, not “negative”. The people who dislike snap have likely moved to other distributions, and I don’t see any widespread praise considering Ubuntu’s market share within the Linux ecosystem, so the most likely answer is that people either don’t know or don’t care about snap.
Whether or not an application is packaged as a snap is also a poor indication. Most of the software used in Ubuntu still comes from an APT repo, mostly official or sometimes a PPA. Many developers distribute their software exclusively as flatpaks, appimages, or binaries. Shit, Valve even recommends against using the snap version of Steam. By using your standard, snap would be considered an abject failure.
Snap doesn’t really even have as many applications packaged as people think. Snap’s package count is often touted as being much higher than Flatpak’s. However, this is misleading, as Snap allows the inclusion of many command-line interface (CLI) only packages that aren’t well-suited for containerization.
The inclusion of these CLI-only packages drastically inflates Snap’s overall package count, while Flatpak does not include as many standalone CLI tools.
Furthermore, packaging CLI tools as Snap or Flatpak packages doesn’t really make much sense. A huge amount of CLI tools were never intended to be used inside a containerized environment like Snap. As a result, there will likely be compatibility issues and unsupported edge cases.
Additionally, there are already established universal packaging standards for CLI tools, such as Nix and Homebrew. These packaging systems are better suited for distributing standalone CLI applications compared to containerized formats like Snap and Flatpak.