Ubuntu Summit The Register FOSS desk sat down with Canonical’s vice-president for engineering, Jon Seager, during Ubuntu Summit earlier this month. This is a heavily condensed version of our conversation.
Thank you Canonical for reinforcing my pre-existing opinions about Snaps, and your organization more broadly.
I can’t believe they fumbled their reputation so bad lol
TL;DR: Canonical doubling down on snaps. Further down the line, if you refuse snaps, audio won’t work since pipewire is to become a snap. He also uses Apple and Play Services as a “good example”.
Sigh. I really was hoping they would’ve learned by now.
Glad I switched to Debian a few years back. Got that hassle out of the way and I see no reason to use Ubuntu.
Been meaning to fully switch to Debian for a while, but I’ve been making due modifying my apt sources to have the apt version of Firefox from the ppa and pin it above the snap version, but I guess at some point I’ll have to bite the bullet and do a reinstall.
Kinda crazy this had been 10 year old Ubuntu installs that I’ve kept going year after year from OS upgrades to hardware upgrades. My server Ubuntu install has transitioned from a Q6600 Intel core 2 duo, to a i7-4770, and would have survived another hardware upgrade I’m going to plan but that’ll probable be when i do my reinstall.
My personal laptop install has gone through 3 different laptops that I’ve just moved over from 1 drive to the next with gparted, from a dell vostro 3550, to a Dell latitude e7450, to a dell latitude 7490, again looking at an upgrade for the laptop too, I’ll probably reinstall with Debian.
If anyone has any new-ish AMD based laptop recommendations that are upgradeable (non-soldered ram, etc) and that don’t break the bank, I’d appreciate it! Apparently dell doesn’t sell any AMD laptops other than 1 outdated model from before 2020 I think.
It doesn’t answer your question directly, but https://linuxpreloaded.com/ has a large list of vendors you could check out.
I feel like the obvious picks from the linux crowd would be a thinkpad or framework. I’m sure there are other great options though
System76
Why not vanilla? It is your next Operating System.
This is a pretty frustrating interview to me. He doesn’t really seem to engage at all with the fact that building a core system component in a way that isn’t fully open completely looses all of the resiliency to enshittification or conflict of interest between corporation and users that makes linux a good thing in the first place.
I don’t personally really like that fedora chooses to repackage and serve their own versions of flatpaks. But that its possible is mandatory, because otherwise if flatpaks are successful and they end up making choices that are user hostile, there is no escape hatch.
Its a completely unnecessary choice, and is to me, entirely disqualifying. If snaps were to become successful it would be a bad thing for this ecosystem that I care about.
I also find it frankly bewildering that he talks about everything being their own software stack as a flex, when this whole space is built on collaboration building together, and then goes on to describe it as vertical integration, a form of anticompetitive behavior that countries make laws aimed at preventing. Vertical integration is not a good thing.
Its fine if your stack is all yours, but thinking vertical integration is a flex feels really slimy and out of touch to me
Canonical, leading the charge towards enshittification of Linux. Who would’ve guessed this 20 years ago?
Red hat has also done some weird things in the past. Guess the Linux community is against corporations.
Isn’t base Ubuntu losing marketshare?
I know it’s not comprehensive, but the Steam survey shows Mint skyrocketing and Ubuntu dropping like a rock. And I feel like Snap doesn’t matter in server deployments or business machines. So… who’s this for?
Snap absolutely matters in server deployments FYI. Its advantages are pretty clear in that space, and arguably more suited to it.
The only reason I can think of to use a Snap is that you’re using Ubuntu, and some package you expected to be available through apt is now only available as a Snap. The better solution is to not use Ubuntu, and rely on Docker or Podman to get anything not available as a system package.
They do? Why?
Oh, that’s interesting. And from what I know about Flatpak, I can see issues there.
…If snap (and base Ubuntu) basically diverge to, and specialize in, server usage, that seems fine.
The more important metric to Canonical however is corporate / paying customer marketshare - I am guessing it hasn’t suffered too much otherwise they would have backed down on some of their decisions regarding snaps.
In reality, every time you add another store, you are essentially giving those people root on your machine.
That’s not true. Not even I have root when using flatpak, how should anyone else have root using my flatpak.
I guess he just means that you give them a lot of power but root is not the same
In reality, every time you add another store, you are essentially giving those people root on your machine.
Shuttleworth made the exact claim like 10 or so years ago about Ubuntu not being a democracy and Canonical being root on all Ubuntu machines.
Is it a line in their internal 10 commandments?
It was an idea he wrote about once for a high school homework assignment, and he got an A on it. (/s for people not familiar with Canonical’s weird obsession with employee highschool performance)
Zorin OS is Ubuntu based. I wonder if, like Mint, they prioritize apt and flatpaks over snaps when using apt.
I don’t in anyway support where Canonical is going with this but I also understand why they’re doing it.
