Snaps are getting cornered?

snapcrafters
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Okay, why I am saying this? Just checked some very popular apps of linux.

  1. gimp —> 2.10.30 ----> 2.10.32
  2. obs-studio —> 27.1.3 —> 28.0.1
  3. geary —> not available
  4. krita —> 5.1.5 ----> 5.1.1
  5. evince —> 42.3 —> 43.3

The above table is in the order of snap name, current snap stable version, current actual stable version. None of the snaps are really up-to-date and it’s not necessary to mention that none of these big apps have an official snap version. Why is this? Is snap really dying? What do you guys think? Also to add, the core22 yet doesn’t have latest version of libadwaita, which may be a reason for thousand of gnome apps not coming in the snap format. Yet having the huge benefit of security and stability over other formats, why is it getting ignore by devs?

Recently I discussed with the dev of newsflash to have a official snap, he just simply refused it saying that the whole community now uses flatpak. Why are we lagging behind? My thougts:

  1. A good documentation( Even I am not yet succesful to make a snap)
  2. Ease of support
  3. Snap store being proprietry
  4. People aren’t trying to solve the problems they face with their snaps, like-slow startup, native messaging etc. (Firefox is actually one of the biggest examples that these all can be fixed easily)
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I think another major problem that needs addressing (that apparently may be addressed in a few months according to this thread) is how Snaps don’t actually run the same across all distributions due to it relying on custom AppArmor patches provided to Ubuntu for some sandboxing/security features.

This can break apps or cause major security holes (as documented by a developer of the Nextcloud Snap) and occurs on most non-Ubuntu distros, which is a huge problem for a system that is meant to universal, and that Canonical advertises works on over 40 distros. One of the most frustrating parts about this to me is that it’s been this way since 2016, when the porting effort to other distros began. About 7 years later this is still a problem. That just sucks.

So I wouldn’t be shocked if this was a reason why some developers choose not to bother with it. But I also think another big reason would be the general bad publicity it garners due to the reasons you listed.

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There are around 2100 flatpaks in flathub (other flatpak sources are available), and around 5100 public snaps in the snap store. Most of the snaps are kept up to date on a regular basis. Some, community maintained ones, aren’t. That’s a shame. It’s also the same for some flatpaks in flathub. It’s not the “death” of snaps though, nor are they on the ropes as you suggest. They’re pretty much exactly the same position they were in 3 years ago.

  • GIMP 2.10.32 is in the edge channel
  • OBS-Studio is a large and complex package. The person who mostly maintained it left the team, and hasn’t updated it since. If someone else could step up and help, that’d be awesome.
  • Geary - it’s always difficult getting GNOME community people to “care” about snaps when they’re so wedded to flatpak. So it requires someone who cares about Geary, GNOME and has time to maintain that page.
  • Krita - ask the Krita maintainers. Although like GIMP it’s only a few minor points behind.
  • Evince - poke @kenvandine as he maintains that one.

So it’s mostly a people problem. They need more people to maintain these things. That’s a hard problem to solve when there’s a lot of community momentum behind flatpak, and some negativity towards Canonical in general and snap specifically. It’s not an impossible problem to solve, but people have limited times in their lives, and will often gravitate towards projects that solve problems that they care about.

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I guess you missed this also

The number of people who know how to build snap is very less, and the community isn’t always active. I have faced issues for my first ever snaps, all of them I posted about in the forum, and what I got is a very short answer, which doesn’t even solve the things. Even today I posted about a snap, I am facing issues with.

Does gimp, krita, geary, evince, obs-studio don’t fall in this 5100 number? And if yes, then within my small knowledge I’ve pointed you packages, “Big Packages” not maintained properly, getting updates late.

Please be to the point, I said not official, and as you also proved, these packages are maintained by people, not team itself, making these unofficial. Yet this “complex package” is maintained by the team as flatpak. Does that mean, packing a flatpak is easy? According to community, it’s not. A recent post by it’sfoss also mentioned that.

  1. https://itsfoss.com/flatpak-vs-snap/
  2. https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/u4te9z/flatpak_or_snap/

Ubuntu is the biggest distro which ships Gnome by default, Isn’t it the duty of us, the Ubuntu team & users also, that we keep the packages maintaining?

Well, I’m not here to criticize, as I also love snaps, and want them to grow. But atleast first update and increase the documentations. A lot of them aren’t updated for almost 4 years. Also, I’ll be personally very thankful to you or anyone, who will help me out in making my first snap package.

2 Likes
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The number of people who know how to build snap is very less, and the community isn’t always active. I have faced issues for my first ever snaps, all of them I posted about in the forum, and what I got is a very short answer, which doesn’t even solve the things. Even today I posted about a snap, I am facing issues with.

Packaging software is hard. That’s true on any platform, with any packaging system. A ton of effort is made to make these things easier but it will almost certainly never be easy. Your linked question about freetube and vlc shows a lack of understanding of snaps. Snaps are confined. Being unable to launch random binaries on your system is a feature of the packaging system.

Does gimp, krita, geary, evince, obs-studio don’t fall in this 5100 number? And if yes, then within my small knowledge I’ve pointed you packages, “Big Packages” not maintained properly, getting updates late.

Yes, they’re all in the store and thus are in the 5100 number. My point in giving you that number is a datapoint to illustrated that flatpak hasn’t exactly eaten snap in terms of raw package numbers. Yes, I agree, some of these “big” or “popular” or “desireable” packages get outdated. Again, that’s a people problem which affects flatpak, deb, ppas, the AUR and appimages alike. It’s not a problem that only happens in the snap store.

Please be to the point, I said not official, and as you also proved, these packages are maintained by people, not team itself, making these unofficial.

You know teams are people too? :slight_smile: Forget about them being official or unofficial for a moment. The people doing the packaging are human beings with limited time on this planet to do stuff. That might be coding, bug triage, walking, swimming and sleeping, or it might be packaging. Whether they work on the core team for a project or are a community contributor (arguably the same thing for open source), they’re people. It’s not about easy or hard packaging, it’s about people. Get. More. People.

Ubuntu is the biggest distro which ships Gnome by default, Isn’t it the duty of us, the Ubuntu team & users also, that we keep the packages maintaining?

Yes. Which packages will you volunteer to maintain?

While I was working for Canonical I helped maintain many, and it’s exhausting, relentless, and thankless. People bitch and moan at you for not keeping things up to date, and never thank you when you do. So it’s hardly unsurprising that people give up.

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Firefox now have the native-messaging host support, in flatpaks, that’s done via some flatpak-spawn command, is there really no way for other snaps?

If I get some help acquiring more knowledge about this, I will manage atleast 10-15 snaps if not more. I already am a package maintainer of the Pacstall project, which is also aimed toward Ubuntu. But seeing it’s limitations, I got interested about snap packaging.

Can feel you as I also have a same role in a different organization. But I am also a human. So I need documentations to learn, well-fed, updated documentations. Help from the community is also appreciated.

1 Like
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just make your app call xdg-open (shipped by default in all base snaps) and snapd will hand over the call to your desktop system where the default application for the respective mime type will be launched (this has worked in snaps since 2015)…

…but like alan said, there is no way for your snap to call random binaries on the host and this is on purpose … you can bundle the apps if you need a specific one from a deb or another snap via stage-snaps or stage-packages.

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Can you please check the original thread also?

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Firefox now have the native-messaging host support, in flatpaks, that’s done via some flatpak-spawn command

This is actually functionality I’ve been searching far and wide online for, could you please expand on this? :sweat_smile:

(also, I think the Firefox Snap actually has this functionality built-in, albeit only with Ubuntu based distros that have a certain patch iirc. If I’m wrong and it does work on all distros though that would be awesome.)

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this functionality is provided via xdg portals by your desktop, it is not ubuntu specific at all but your desktop session needs to have the xdg portals packages installed (most modern desktops should have that nowadays)

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So some important 10k packages(also from Gnome and KDE freshies) can’t be scripted to build their packages and upload them to snap stable channel(when there is release)?

And some full timers doing their job could test some basic functionality instead of program packagers instead of third parties don’t bothering to update their package after some time passed?

I think that is better than crippled store…

1 Like
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Well, did you say in favour of me? I didn’t understand quite well what you said btw. Sorry, can you simplify it?