Snap to it

[tom r lopes]

What is the deal with snap and or flatpack?  

I'm still installing via apt  but I guess if you are going the gui route you will see snaps. 

What is the use case here?  

I thought I was doing good when I realized I could hunt and peck apt instead of apt-get. 

Also if there are any Arch users out there: What do you do to keep AUR up to date?  Is there a way to hook into pacman?  I guess I could see how Manjaro does it. 

Thomas

[Rick Moen]

Quoting tom r lopes (tomr...@gmail.com):

> What is the deal with snap and or flatpack?
>
> I'm still installing via apt but I guess if you are going the gui route
> you will see snaps.
>
> What is the use case here?

In my probably cynical opinion, the use case is: 'I'm from the
proprietary software world and expect applications to be bundled with
everything they need including libs, rather than going through the
bother of keeping applications in harmony with system libs, like one of
those long-haired open source hippies.'

Flatpaks are able to be created in a decentralised fashion by any old
person. They're more than a bit like PPAs, except with more
self-contained bundling of software resources. Snap packages are under
the central thumb of Canonical, Ltd., feed through Canonical's Snap
online 'package store' (only), and can be contributed to only if you
sign a licensing agreement with Canonical, Ltd.

The whole thing is obviously inspired by the Docker container-software
craze in cloud computing, which itself has a lot of that proprietary
software mentality behind it.

The Ubuntu propaganda machine is of course pushing Snap. Flatpak has a
more diverse rah-rah squad including Docker types and gamer punks, and
unlike Snap/snapd isn't distro-specific. Fans of either implementation
tend to call them 'universal installers', rather than the unflattering
characterisation I've made of them above. (In case it isn't obvious, I
personally have no use for either one, and think they're both yet
another way to try to replicate the mistakes of Microsoft Windows, for
which, no thanks.)

And _of course_ Canonical is in the middle of the latest of those
efforts, because it's always trying to make itself relevant by muscling
into anything currently fashionable.

Views Differ[tm].

[tom r lopes]

Yeah, Rick, that was what I thought.  

And you mention Docker ...  

I'm curious about that too.  I haven't played with it yet.  But Docker makes 

sense to me as a way to run like a VM without the using up the space.  

But then I see people talk about Docker on the PI and I go "what the hell"  

Thomas

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[Rick Moen]

Quoting tom r lopes (tomr...@gmail.com):

> Yeah, Rick, that was what I thought.
>
> And you mention Docker ... I'm curious about that too. I haven't
> played with it yet. But Docker makes sense to me as a way to run like
> a VM without the using up the space.

Well, sort of. Except not.

Docker first arose on cloud clusters (including without limitations
Amazon AWS. When it was new and shiny, I kept asking the proponents
'Hey, how are you going to protect security, given that you lack the
host/guest isolation that's automatic with real hypervisor software
like KVM / VirtualBox / VMware?' And the answer was always a close
variant on 'Uh, yeah, security! It'll be great. We'll have that nailed
down Real Soon Now.'

I could be wrong, but I don't think they have it nailed down, and don't
think it'll ever be really good in that area.

> But then I see people talk about Docker on the PI and I go "what the hell"

Some people talk about a pair of things and without thinking imagine that
the two of them together must automatically be a good thing, like,
dunno, maybe injections and disinfectants. ;->

[Alan Davis]

I've been using Manjaro, which almost boils down to using Arch.  I can only provide a tentative answer to your question about keeping AUR up to date: I don't know all the ins and outs.  I use an AUR Helper, if you will, called "Yay".  It is fantastic! A command line tool the runs almost all pacman commands transparently, for the official distro and AUR packages.   I only have learned a few options, the ones that I need to stay sane.   AFAICR, it is possible to get a listing of packages installed from AUR.  If not, Pamac-manager is, I think, installed with pamac, by default on Manjaro.  The GUI  enables me to enable various repositories, including AUR; and whether to check for AUR updates. 

AFAICT, yay keeps AUR packages up to date.  For almost all pacman commands/options, yay works as a transparent replacement for pacman.  Unlike pacman (but similar to Yaourt, which it replaces) It does not require to use sudo to run, as a mere mortal, but does ask for a password later on. 

I've had few problems, and cannot remember when I've needed to manually update a package from AUR.  Maybe a few.   No more PPDs for me.  Damn!  This distro works so well, I've gotten lazy. 

Alan Davis

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