But why is it an issue that Canonical controls a source of software for their own OS? Isn’t that the same with every distro’s repository?
No. You can add any other repository to apt, rpm, Flatpak, etc. You cannot do the same with Snap and that’s by design. Canonical wants to be the sole gatekeeper of Linux software, hoping that all developers have no alternative but to publish software on the Snap store (ideally only there) which works best on Ubuntu.
Exactly. I feel they want to sell it to a big player, but no big player will touch it unless they can fully control it. Hence snap as part of that plan. Ubuntu is a hell no for me.
Then I guess it’s a good thing they don’t control all other Linux distros.
But they would to a degree if the Snap Store would actually succeed becoming the Linux app store (like Steam is for games but that’s more because all other vendors don’t care to make a Linux client).
You can; the issue is that you can’t add two snap repositories at once.
This is functionally pretty much the same thing, as nobody is likely to want to use snap while locking themselves out of the main snap repository, but it’s still important to make the distinction.
In theory I guess there’s nothing stopping you setting up a mirror of the main snap repo with automatic package scraping, but nobody’s really bothered exploring it seeing as no distro other than Ubuntu has taken any interest in running snap.
It’s all open source so there’s no reason you couldn’t fork it and add that functionality. Although it’d probably be a fairly involved piece of work; it wouldn’t be a simple one-line change.
It’s not all open source. Canonical merely made available a super simple reference implementation of the Snap server but the actual Snap Store is proprietary.
From reading this that’s not the whole story. Someone working at canonical successfully made a version of snap that could use alternative stores, but the default version does not allow it
And honestly at the point of installing that modified version you may as well just install a different package manager anyway
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No. You can add any other repository to apt, rpm, Flatpak, etc. You cannot do the same with Snap and that’s by design. Canonical wants to be the sole gatekeeper of Linux software, hoping that all developers have no alternative but to publish software on the Snap store (ideally only there) which works best on Ubuntu.
Therefore: Fuck Snap.
Exactly. I feel they want to sell it to a big player, but no big player will touch it unless they can fully control it. Hence snap as part of that plan. Ubuntu is a hell no for me.
Forget selling it.
I think they’re going to get everyone trapped in the ecosystem, and then they’ll start charging for access to the source.
@caseyweederman @makingStuffForFun the prediction imperative will come in before that. surveillance capitalism is how they will make their fortune
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That’s exactly what they’re trying to change.
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Yes, thank god for that.
But they would to a degree if the Snap Store would actually succeed becoming the Linux app store (like Steam is for games but that’s more because all other vendors don’t care to make a Linux client).
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Smoke and mirrors. You cannot add a secondary Snap repository.
You can; the issue is that you can’t add two snap repositories at once.
This is functionally pretty much the same thing, as nobody is likely to want to use snap while locking themselves out of the main snap repository, but it’s still important to make the distinction.
In theory I guess there’s nothing stopping you setting up a mirror of the main snap repo with automatic package scraping, but nobody’s really bothered exploring it seeing as no distro other than Ubuntu has taken any interest in running snap.
I know that it’s possible to change the one entry but adding additional ones is not possible and that’s by design.
Is that an artificial limitation that could be resolved by third-party clients?
It’s all open source so there’s no reason you couldn’t fork it and add that functionality. Although it’d probably be a fairly involved piece of work; it wouldn’t be a simple one-line change.
Who knows? Maybe it’s just “#define STORES_LIMIT 1”?
It’s not all open source. Canonical merely made available a super simple reference implementation of the Snap server but the actual Snap Store is proprietary.
From reading this that’s not the whole story. Someone working at canonical successfully made a version of snap that could use alternative stores, but the default version does not allow it
And honestly at the point of installing that modified version you may as well just install a different package manager anyway
Or better yet, a different OS.
Might I suggest NixOS best package manager out there imo