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Cake day: January 29th, 2024

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  • The claim that snaps are a Canonical NIH thing is falsified by those two facts. Even if Canonical said “okay, we’ll distribute desktop apps with Flatpak,” that wouldn’t affect the vast majority of their ongoing effort for snaps, which are related to things that Flatpak simply doesn’t do. Instead, they’d have the separate work of making the moving target of flatpaks work with their snap-based systems such as Ubuntu Core while still having to fully maintain that snap based ecosystem for the enterprise customers who use it for things that Flatpak simply doesn’t do.



  • I don’t like snaps because it’s just another Canonical NIH thing. Everyone else agreed on flatpak which seems to have a good design with portals and all and being fully open.

    Snaps both predate flatpak and do things that Flatpaks are not designed to do.

    Canonical have also been a part of the desktop portals standard for a very long time, as they’ve been a part of how snaps do things.



  • Flatpak has long had the ability to dump the contents of a snap into it, because snaps had already solved many of the build issues flatpaks were struggling with and they used similar runtimes for their sandboxing. It’s also a convenient way to convert apps over, since many apps got packaged as snaps before flatpak was really usable.




  • That is the behaviour that’s built for when an upgrade through a “classic” package manager (e.g. apt, dnf) updates Firefox while it’s still running. The only way I can think of that you’d get that with a snap is if you’re intentionally bypassing the confinement (e.g. by running /snap/firefox/current/usr/lib/firefox/firefox directly, which can also massively mess with other things since Firefox won’t be running in the core22 environment it expects).

    If you’re using the snap as expected (e.g. opening the .desktop file in /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/, running /snap/bin/firefox or running snap run firefox), snapd won’t replace /snap/firefox/current until you no longer have any processes from that snap running. Instead you’ll get a desktop notification to close and restart Firefox to update it, and two weeks to either do so or to run snap refresh --hold firefox to prevent the update (or something like snap refresh --hold=6w firefox to hold the refresh for 6 weeks). Depending on what graphical updater you have, you may also have the ability to hold the update through that updater.

    Are you sure you’re running the Firefox snap? Because that sounds pretty much precisely like the expected behaviour if someone had gone to lengths to avoid using the snap.












  • Depends what/when you mean.

    Debian 12 was released in June and has some newer, and some older, packages than Ubuntu 24.04. For example Ubuntu has LibreOffice 24.2.2 while Debian has 7.4.5.

    Debian testing currently has a similar distribution to Ubuntu 24.10, though over the next 6 months it’ll pull ahead of that, but Ubuntu 25.04 will likely have on average newer packages than Debian testing until its beta freeze.

    Debian unstable has always had newer packages than the others.