lengau

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.

It depends what you're trying to accomplish. For me, having the ability to essentially use Lego to put together my system is one of the great features of both snap and nix that Flatpak doesn't cover.

There are plenty of use cases that snap provides that flatpak doesn't - they only compete in a subset of snap's functionality. For example, flatpak does not (and is not designed to) provide a way to use it to distribute kernels or system services.

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.

Containers are great, but I find Docker's way of making container images to be pretty bad, personally. Fortunately you can use other tools to create OCI images and then copy them into Docker, as the runtime is pretty nice for dev machines.

I met Soumyadeep at this year's Ubuntu Summit. Really nice guy, very excited about what he's doing.

And in a mirror universe where that decision got made someone's arguing "maybe we shouldn't have cut funding to Israel if it meant allowing the genocide in Ukraine."

The updates download in the background and will install when you exit the snapped app. If you really don't want automatic updates, you can run snap refresh --hold to hold all automatic updates or add a snap name to hold updates for that snap.

A built-in way to have services running (which is why openprinting can make a snap of CUPS but AFAICT can't make a Flatpak).

In this case it is a law. A law that Warren co-authored.

A few off the top of my head:

• Every time I try it I have installation issues, across a wide variety of hardware. (Newbies have also reported to me that "Linux can't even install" after trying Mint - when I sit them down with a Kubuntu install on the same machine it tends to go flawlessly)
• Cinnamon seems to have stability issues (this is one of the more common things I've had now ie friends complain about and ask for help with)
• the blocking of snapd in the repos and the way it's done can be pretty confusing to newbies when they click a "get it on the snap store" button and things just fall apart. (I also think their blocking of snapd itself is fairly user hostile, but the fact that the UX around it is so bad is also a problem)
• On the subject of blocking packages in the repos - their own packages seem to have file conflicts with the Ubuntu repos they use but don't put the relevant "Conflicts" lines in their deb metadata, which I've seen cause conflicts for newbies that break apt. (KDE Neon does a much better job of taking care of this IMO, but I certainly don't view it as a beginner friendly distro either)
• The lack of a Plasma version is a major downside to me. (Random aside: I once had a newbie ask me how she could get the pretty version of Linux I had because hers was so ugly - she was running stock Mint and I was on Fedora's KDE spin)

Yeah, I really don't get why so many people call Mint good for beginners. There are so many reasons it's not, yet it has this incredibly vocal crowd who insist it's so fantastic.