I know this thread is likely to quickly descend into 50 variants of “ew, snap”, but it’s a good write up of what is really a pretty interesting novel approach to the immutable desktop world.
As the article says, it could well be the thing that actually justifies Canonical’s dogged perseverance with snaps in the first place.
Snap makes a lot of sense for desktop apps in my opinion. There’s a conceptual difference between system level packages that you install using something like APT, and applications. Applications should be managed at the user layer while the base system should provide all the common libraries and APIs.
It’s also worth noting that this is a similar approach to what MacOS has been doing for ages with .app bundles where any shared libraries and assets are packaged together in the app folder. The approach addresses a lot of the issues you see with shared libraries such as having two different apps that want different versions of a particular library.
The trade off is that you end up using a bit more disk space and memory, but it’s so negligible that the benefits of having apps being self-contained far outweigh these downsides.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Ordinary desktop and server Ubuntu aren’t going anywhere, and the next release, numbered 24.04 and codenamed Noble Numbat as we mentioned last month, will be the default and come with all the usual editions and flavors.
Nor is this a whole new product: it is a graphical desktop edition of the existing Ubuntu Core distro, as we examined on its release in June last year, a couple of months after 22.04.
Ubuntu Core is Canonical’s Internet of Things (IoT) distro, intended to be embedded on edge devices, such as digital signs and smart displays.
Most of the major Linux vendors have immutable offerings, and The Reg has looked at several over the years, including MicroOS, the basis of SUSE’s next-gen enterprise OS ALP.
Former Canonical staffer Alan Pope demonstrated a Steam Deck running Ubuntu Core at the event, and his lengthy blog post about the experience contains some interesting details about how well the developer preview already works.
Compression of Flatpak apps is a key reason that Fedora now uses Btrfs, although it’s worth noting that, as of yet, Snap doesn’t include any form of deduplication between separate packages.
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