In addition to what’s already been said, Canonical have a history of starting grandiose projects and then abandoning them a few years later. See Mir, Unity, and Ubuntu Touch for examples.

Calling it hate is an exaggeration , people are entitled to their opinion and informing other people by criticizing snap.

Another advantage not mentioned is that snap is a product of canonical (a for profit company talking about an IPO for years), flathub is managed by the gnome foundation (a US registered non profit, which should provide some legal protection).

The server is proprietary and last I checked you can’t even turn off auto-updating or verify the binaries they push to you.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-mint-dumps-ubuntu-snap/

In the Ubuntu 20.04 package base, the Chromium package is indeed empty and acting, without your consent, as a backdoor by connecting your computer to the Ubuntu Store. Applications in this store cannot be patched, or pinned. You can’t audit them, hold them, modify them, or even point Snap to a different store. You’ve as much empowerment with this as if you were using proprietary software, i.e. none. This is in effect similar to a commercial proprietary solution, but with two major differences: It runs as root, and it installs itself without asking you.

As you can probably tell by all the lovely comments about Snaps, that’s the reason. Snaps is crap, by design.

Lost a couple hours of work on the snap version of krita since it couldn’t save the file for some reason. Switched away from Ubuntu as a whole after that experience.

they both suck.

The problem with snap isn’t that it’s useless, it’s that it’s garbage. Snaps are just plain worse in every way, compared to other packaging formats. They impact boot time A LOT… like A LOT A LOT on a hard drive, use a ton of space, are slow to launch unless you use like tricks or what not to speed up consequent launches after the 1st one, the store backend is proprietary and poorly moderated, the store is slow and unresponsive, and cannonnical is pulling some real micro$oft-esk shit to try and force them on users… Stuff like aliasing apt commands to snap, disallowing ubuntu spins to ship flatpak by default, etc…

The only redeeming quality that snaps have is that you can run CLI/server programs as a snap, and even then, just use docker lmao.

snapdeez nuts

I would hate snaps a lot less if Ubuntu just stopped trying to force me to use them.

I think most people hate Snaps because Ubuntu is replacing .deb packages with snaps with no user prompt and that is a cardinal sin in Linux against the freedom and power of the user. Being “bloated” can’t help either when package maintainers do all what they can to ship programs light and simple. So it goes against at least two Linux principles.

When I install this snap am I getting a kernel driver, a native raw binary, or a containerized user application that conforms to a communication interface? Who knows! They’re all mostly undifferentiated in the store.

What about a third party store? Only if you fork the snap daemon and change the hard coded URL. And good luck with that mandatory Canonical contributer agreement you have to sign.

Want to pick when your apps update? Nope. That’s the official stance. They will never support that. But here’s a way to manually block network access to the daemon if you really really need to. But then everything will update at once when you give it access again.

Want a specific version of a snap? See above. Explicitly will never be an option.

“I guess there’s a fee to pay to get access to quality apps.” Incorrect. There is no real vetting process for what’s added to the store, there’s barely even minimal checking that you’re not overwriting someone else’s snap. You do have to sign the Canonical contributor agreement, and setup an identity to submit as, but even if your snap is proven to be malware there a good chance it will stay in the store, or can be immediately re-uploaded.

I hate snap, because their store is proprietary and i think forcing something with a proprietary store on you is microsoft level shit which is why i left in the first place.

Also i dont like being “forced”, theyre doing that a little with the apt install sometimes going to snap install

Imma be honest. I never used Snap. I had left ubuntu long before they started rolling it out.

That said, hearing they redirect apt calls to snap instead feels – A bit too microsofty for my tastes

Like, when you use a flatpak (or even a snap!) in a non-ubuntu distro, you’re not forced to use it. And if the same package exists on both the repo and on flatpak/snap, you CAN choose to get it from any of the three sources. Forcing people into snap is weird and scummy.

I have heard that snap is slower than flatpak, but also that it can do some stuff flatpak cannot, but again, didn’t test enough to know it.

I remember back in 2018 when they forced snaps on everyone despite them being broken.

I had recently updated to the new 18 or 19 release and I was installing a command line tool. I did apt install and then it called snap which then didn’t work. Snaps are broken by design as they way the handle software is problematic. They put everything into mounted volumes and the sandboxing isn’t terribly robust. It really doesn’t help that they force you to use it.

Well, things like the fact that snap is supposed to be a distro-agnostic packaging method despite being only truly supported on Ubuntu is annoying. The fact that its locked to the Canonical store is annoying. The fact that it requires a system daemon to function is annoying.

My main gripes with it stem from my job though, since at the university where I work snap has been an absolute travesty;
It overflows the mount table on multi-user systems.
It slows down startup a ridiculous amount even if barely any snaps are installed.
It can’t run user applications if your home drive is mounted over NFS with safe mount options.
It has no way to disable automatic updates during change critical times - like exams.

There’s plenty more issues we’ve had with it, but those are the main ones that keep causing us issues.
Notably Flatpak doesn’t have any of the listed issues, and it also supports both shared installations as well as internal repos, where we can put licensed or bulky software for courses - something which snap can’t support due to the centralized store design.