Iâm finally going to chime in here a bit.
I started working with Snaps in May for my new job. I have been tasked with rolling an Ubuntu Core 18 image for my companyâs hardware platform to distribute to one of our partners for their own purposes. So, all my thoughts are through an embedded developerâs lens.
So far, Iâve had a lot of trouble with this. A good chunk of my trouble can be chalked up to me being a noob and growing pains (the platform isnât that old), however, thereâs a LOT of missing, outdated, misleading, or just plain wrong documentation for the embedded side, which Canonical is pushing a LOT. Itâs been a total pain to fight through these issues, and I do REALLY appreciate all the help Iâve received on this forum, but, a lot of my issues I feel shouldâve already been addressed, or taken care of, for a platform that so heavily pushes the embedded side.
A few examples
Iâd love to contribute to this documentation, and to an extent, I have. But I donât get paid to contribute, so Iâm doing most of this after work out of sheer frustration of battling whatever absurd issue I come across.
Itâs also practically impossible to develop on the actual unit itself simply due to the static, read-only nature of Ubuntu Core and its snap base, which, while I certainly understand the appeal, makes iterating on software for Ubuntu Core really, really slow. I feel like that issue needs to be addressed somehow. Although, maybe thatâs just the nature of snaps and I need to gain a better understanding of the platform.
Finally, and this one is way less important than my other problems, thereâs the really annoying fact that super popular tools such as, oh, say, vim
, arenât available as snaps on all platforms, not even armhf
(so forget about having a good text editor on my dev device). Iâll be the first to say that I should be the change I want to see in the world, but again, I donât get paid to do that, and thereâs only so much day in my day. I think Canonical should at least make an effort to ensure that basic tools such as vim
are available as snaps.
So, in summary, Iâd say Snaps donât really shine in the embedded world either. They make embedded development feel sluggish.
Thatâs my two cents.