The Desktop team has just returned from our engineering sprint in Gothenburg, and as we begin the development cycle for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, I’m excited to share what’s coming next for Ubuntu Desktop. Long-term support releases traditionally focus on stability, refinement, and a cohesive user experience across installation, daily use, security, and enterprise integration. Here is a look at the key themes and what we aim to deliver when 26.04 ships next April. Desktop Experience Gnome 50 and ne...
  • ashx64@lemmy.worldOP
    8·
    13 hours ago

    Snap is interesting for me it can do more things than flatpak and has some really interesting sandboxing features coming up such as permission prompts for filesystem access.

    But Canonical management is a significant hindrance. The Snap Store simply cannot be trusted after so much malware got in and they still have not improved their processes. So many snaps including Canonical’s own, are still using core22 for some reason. And there’s the broken snaps Canonical pushed on users.

    I would love to see a snap repo that takes the best parts of Flathub and Fedora Flatpaks. Because as a technology, I think snap beats flatpak (if you’re using AppArmor). But it’s Canonical’s poor management that really drags it down.

    • jlsalvador@lemmy.mlEnglish
      8·
      13 hours ago

      On the other hand:

      • Loop-device exhaustion (slow, though Ubuntu has increased the limit via a patch).
      • A single point of failure due to Canonical’s repository imposition (a closed garden).
      • Unmaintained branches and snapped apps.
      • Implicit installation of snapped apps through the apt CLI instead of the originally supported packages 🤬 (what the hell, Canonical!? Are you doing the same crap as Microsoft?).

      The server-side closed garden is the opposite of an open ecosystem and the open-source community. You can add custom repositories to APT or Flatpak. Every new snap interaction feels like another step toward forcing the user to use it, instead of offering cool features that convince users on their own merits.

      The last change (installing snapped apps when you run apt install) was horrendous. What’s next? Installing snapped apps when the user runs flatpak install?

      • makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml
        1·
        2 hours ago

        The only logical reason for them forcing users into their own, proprietary snap store, when a user is trying to install from another source, is they want complete control over that ecosystem. And the only reason for that is so that they can eventually sell it to a huge player like Microsoft or Google or Amazon.

        They are completely untrusted with that slimy move.

      • ashx64@lemmy.worldOP
        3·
        9 hours ago

        All of those, apart from loop devices, are not technical limitations, but results from Canonical’s poor management and monopolistic desires.

      • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
        1·
        9 hours ago

        Huh. I don’t know enough about Flatpak, I guess repo owners get to make that call? Do Flatpaks have a preinst equivalent? Could you theoretically have an empty Flatpak that installs snaps at a system level? I guess it would need explicit permission to write to the filesystem, which kinda seems to be the opposite of the purpose of Flatpak.
        And like, even if that is possible, the Flathub maintainers would probably reject it on principle. So I’m imagining CanHub with an extra step in the installation instructions that gets you to pipe a curl’d script into sh, at which point, what’s the point?